The Roots of the Equation

Oh my god, I haven’t blogged since August! This has been a hell of a year, let me tell you. But maybe I’ll tell you in another post, because this one is about the new game I made in my Geometry class. (My first non-Algebra game!)

So the game is called Crossing the Transverse. The goal of the game (pedagogically) is to help identify the pairs of angles formed by lines cut by a transversal, even in the most complex of diagrams. The goal of the game (play-wise) is to capture your enemy’s flagship.

Here’s the gameboard:

I printed out the board in fourths, on four different pieces of card stocked, and taped them together to make a nice quad-fold board. Then I made the fleet of ships out of centimeter cubes I had, by writing in permanent marker on the pieces the letter for each ship.

Here’s the rules.

In the game, each type of ship moves a different way, which makes it feel a lot like chess – trying to lay a trap for the enemy flagship without being captured yourself.  Many of my students really enjoyed it when we played it yesterday. Today, though, to solidify, I followed up with this worksheet where they had to analyze the angles of a diagram much like on the game board. They did pretty well on it, so I’m satisfied!

Materials

Crossing the Transverse Rules

Printable Map (Prints on 4 pages)

No Stars Printable Map (If printing the background galaxy is not for you, here’s a more barebones version.)

Zip File with Everything, including Pages, Doc, and GGB files