The Roots of the Equation

Fighting for the Center

At the Math Games morning session at Twitter Math Camp 15, we’ve been created curricular games that hit on some topics that there aren’t really good games for. I came up with the idea for this one, and worked on refining it with the help of Paula Torres (@lohstorres1) and John Golden (@mathhombre).

This game is about measures of central tendency (and range for good measure). Not only do students have to determine all of those over and over as they play the game, but they can see how changing the data set changes the values, especially as the size of the data set increases or decreases. It seems really good because it drives the need to make those calculations.

All you need is two decks of cards. The game is designed as a two-player game, but it would definitely be best done as two pairs playing against each other, so they can talk to each other about their strategies and calculations. We also recommend having students keep a running tally of the values.