RE: Share your classroom ideas here

2017-04-27T23:55:06Z

Hello, I'm Tullia, from Italy.
I teach maths and science in a middle school (from 6th to 8th grade)
I really love "The number devil book", and every year I suggest to my students to read it, as a way to make them "playing with numbers" and feel a little bit more engaged with the world of mathematics without fear.
This year I took the chance to work more on the book, with my 11 years old students and they were really very engaged.
It took one months to students reading the book. We read some chapters together at school, to prepare the "magic environment" of the book. While reading the first chapter we started getting engaged: we cut the biggest chewin-gum we found in very little parts, imagining to a cut it till the nanoscale...
Then we played with series of numbers, and we played with calculators, to find how many times we had to cut a sandwich "to reach the moon" (the sandwich was 6 cm high: each time its size was becoming half, but its height was becoming double… they had to discover how many times they needed to cut in order to reach the distance Earth-Moon).

Playing in this way, it happened that students enriched their love for our time with the book, so I proposed them to invent a game based on the book itself. We had a brainstorming and we decided to design a complete game, and its rules. We called it “The number devil game” (Il gioco del Mago dei Numeri) and we agreed that every student had to prepare 5 exercises to put in the game, in order to repeat all the mathematical contents they studied from the beginning of the school year!

If someone wants to try…

Materials:
60 cards “The wizard questions”
12 cards “inspiration”
6 stars (divided in 6 pieces)
2 dices
6 pawns
1 hourglass

Players
From 2 to 6 (also divided in teams)

Age
from 11 years old

How to play
Put in the middle of the board the two decks of inspiration and wizard cards.
Put the pawns on the start box. Every player throw the dices: the first one is that who have the highest score.

Every time you reach a game box (except when you reach a nightmare or an inspiration box) you have to take a “wizard card”. “Roberto”, the player, has the time of one turn of the hourglass to answer the wizard question. If the answer is correct, he wins a piece of star. (Nothing in case he fails, or the time is over).

Something bad happens if the player arrives in one of the 4 “nightmare boxes”:

“Lo scivolo infinito” (the infinite chute): throw the dice and go back of the number of boxes showed on the dice
“Il professor Mandibola” (Professor Jaw): stop for a round
“Il pesce incantato” (the enchanted fish): go one box back
“La bicicletta” (the bicycle): go back to the start box

There are other 4 special boxes: the inspiration boxes, that allow you to collect a "inspiration card", useful to to cancel nightmare effects.

Aim of the game
Aim of the game is completing a round of the board AND completing the star puzzle.

images here:

https://goo.gl/Wfk5ca

Tullia

RE: Welcome

2017-04-23T16:24:26Z

Hello Robert, Agueda and everybody!
Three of the books that were selected are between my favourite books, and I will follow the discussion in next days.
There is one more book, that I would like to suggest, even if it will not be in the competition. It is a new book, but it is already famous. Every girl would have to read it ;)
I've just finished reading it both in English and in Italian, and I've already brought it at school:

"Good night stories for rebel girls" - E.Favilli, F.Cavallo
http://a.co/2V0ggU0

Best regards,Tullia

cat3

RE: Share your classroom ideas here

RE: Welcome