Ep 47. How to Play the Unfair Game in Math Class

Johanna Kuiper 0:00
Back in episode 45, I shared for math predictions I have for 2023. Today, I’m traveling back in time to a game I saw take off in 2022. It was like I saw it once mentioned in a Facebook group, and then I saw it everywhere. And whether that was confirmation bias, or it was truly taking over the math education world. Together, we’re going to unravel the unfair game. Let’s get started.

Welcome to solving for the undefined podcast. I’m your host, Johanna, founder of Miss Kuiper’s Classroom, the place that equips teachers and creating a healthy math classroom where students can thrive, no matter their academic abilities. But it’s not always about the numbers. And that’s why I’m here, bringing you the formulas to solve your problems, math and otherwise, plus strategies on cultivating that necessary math mindset. And that’s what you can count on.

Hello, hello. Welcome to a brand new episode. To give you a quick agenda of today’s episode, we’re going to talk about what is the unfair game, the pros, the cons and what I did to make it better. So first of all, what is the unfair game, it is a whole class game where students are fighting for prizes by correctly working through an answering math problems. And there’s two things that you’ll want to do to set up this game. One, you’ll want to make sure you have a we’ll have names for each class period. And every student’s name in that class period is going to be on there. And it needs to have a fair chance to land on any student’s name. And the second thing that you need is you have to have a list of prizes, and therefore prizes, you want there to be not enough prizes for everyone to get one. But enough for a lot of students to earn one. And I know you think oh, that’s so unfair, every kid should win. That’s the name of the game. unfair game. So here are kind of the rules for the game, you’re going to post a question on the screen. And I usually do a slideshow for this with a timer on it, you’re gonna put a problem on the screen, and then start the timer. Students have one to two minutes depending on the question to answer and work through the problem. After that one to two minutes is up, you’re going to spin that wheel to pick a student, if that chosen student has the correct answer, and has the work shown to back it up. I call this doing the problem with integrity, showing the work that got you to the answer, that student will get to write their name on any one of the prizes. And students can only have one prize with their name on it. And we’ll get to kind of the caveat to that later on. But if that student is wrong, or doesn’t have the work to backup the answer, the teacher or you will spin the wheel again and choose a different student and the process will kind of start over. And I want to be clear the student who gets the answer correct. And with the work to show it does not take the prize, they just write their name by the prize. So you have like it on the whiteboard or something. And students will, quote unquote claim it by putting their name on it. And here’s where this caveat piece comes in. If all of the prizes have been claimed, the next student who gets a question right with the work to back it up, will get to erase any one of the people’s names on the board and replace it with their own name. Hence, some more of why the game is called the unfair game. Also, students can not have their name up there more than once. So if they are chosen for another question, and they get it right, they have to, or they can choose to erase someone else’s name and replace it with theirs. But then they have to erase their name on the original prize, which now leaves a blank space for the next person to put their name up there. And then the game is over when you run out of questions or if your designated time is up. One pro tip that I learned this process is make sure that you have more questions than you have prizes. So if you have 15 questions, make sure you have like 10 prizes, or maybe like a little less, I’d say 10 is probably a good sweet spot if you have 15 questions, because then that will give a chance for five students to erase names and replace it with their own. Before we jump into the pros and cons of the unfair game, I want to talk about what prizes you can use for this game. Because I know for me, I do not like to spend money when I don’t have to. So I like to figure out what can I give as prizes that students will enjoy without break In my wallet, so some of the non monetary prizes I’ve done are like a free time raffle entry, meaning that they’re entered into the free time raffle for when we do i Ready, I’d give him the last 10 minutes of as free time, you could also do a music pass. So they get to listen to music when they’re working on a Chromebook for a day or a class period, lunch with the teacher. Or if you have like a classroom economy, you could also give them a classroom currency. And with that one, you could have multiple prizes for classroom currencies. So you can have like a 50 of classroom currency, or 100 of classroom currency. So you can do that multiple times on the board. You can also see if you could get donations from the community. So going to local shops and seeing if you can get a gift certificate or a gift card, or you could get maybe like some doughnuts or something like that donated to your classroom for this game. And if you’re moving into like the monetary prizes that you can buy for your kids, you could do candy, always a good idea. You can even spice it up by getting a couple of like king sized bars. I’ve seen some teachers give like potatoes as prizes, which is a super budget option. If you think about how cheap potatoes are. You could even spice it up and do like a russet potato and a yellow potato. If you want to be fancy like that. You could do the basics like talkies or other chips, fidget toys, kids love those kinds of things. You could even do lollipops. That’s a budget friendly option right there.

I want you to tell me if this sounds like you, you want your students to feel successful in the math classroom, you’re tired by the lack of effort some students give, and you have no idea how to fix it and help students be better successful in math. If any of those sounded like you, I want you to imagine how it would feel to see your students working together on challenging math problems without giving up or hearing mathematical discussions as your students collaborate. That would be the dream, right? Well, I’m here to tell you that it is possible. How do I know because I’ve done it. And now I want to teach you to do the exact same thing in your classroom. So I proudly introduce you to chaos to community. In this course, I’ll teach you three main things, one, how to build community in as little as two weeks to utilize groups to further student success. And three, how community can foster better math understanding? Sounds good, right? So head on over to the shownotes click on chaos to community and sign up today. Hope to see you in there.

Alright, so now let’s talk about the pros of doing the unfair game within your classroom. One, this is an engaging game for students, students love the idea of being able to win a prize. But there’s also a risk factor involved of like, if they get chosen, they get to choose a prize and their name might be erased. There’s risk involved. And that’s what makes a game engaging to this game is a great review game at the end of a unit because then you can pull different styles of questions in for this type of game. So it is a great end of unit review game. Three, the emphasis of this game is really showing the work to get the correct answer, not just getting the correct answer. And I think too, you’d have to make sure that your students understand what it means to do a problem with integrity of you have to know how the answer is gotten within the context of the problem for you have some really unique prize options within this game. Like I said before, you can do potatoes, you can do music passes, you really have a lot of free leeway with this to create some really engaging things through unique prices. Another pro is this is a full class period game. This is something that will take a really long time. And I know for me if I’m going to put effort into something, I want it to take up a lot of time and it allows you to replicate it every class period. So this is a fun game that takes a lot of time. And the last pro I have the randomness of the wheel of who gets chosen to show the work that randomness insights participation from students kind of going back to like that risk factor of light can be chosen. It really drives students to participate more because they could be chosen for giving the answer And then moving into cons, kind of the flip side of the randomness that incites participation can also be very anxiety inducing for students. So if you have students who struggle with math anxiety, you might need to prep them beforehand, or come up with a way to still involve them within the game, but give them a little bit peace of mind. So to make that better, I have two ideas, you can make this a team or partner based game rather than focused on individuals. So that spinner wheel like for me, I have nine groups in my class. So I could have teams one through nine on the wheel, and then it gets spun. And then they would elect one person from their team to then present the question or the answer to the whole class. And then you can either put the team’s name on the prize, or the student’s name on the prize, depending on what the prize is. But that is one way to kind of help alleviate students who have that math anxiety of like, oh, it can be chosen, like I don’t like that, that doesn’t feel good. It causes more anxiety than excitement for the game itself. So doing it as a team, or partner based activity or game might be the way to go. Another con, if you’re not careful, within the unfair game, you could be putting a spotlight on answer getting rather than truly understanding the process. I know sometimes when I do games with students, I have a couple of students who aren’t paying attention. And then near the end of the timer, they like suddenly, like Get it together and like, Oh, let me just copy down what other people have. And then they try to fit their way into actually having shown work, if that makes sense. And I don’t like to have that in my classroom, I like to make sure that the spotlight is truly on deeply understanding what the problem has. And so I want to make sure that when a student is called on, they can actually walk us through the process. And this is good too, because it helps the whole class review and hear it again, especially if you had kids who didn’t get the problem done or didn’t understand how to get started. They get to hear it from a student from a student’s perspective, how to complete the problem, their thinking process. So when you have a student picked on make sure that they are able to articulate how they gained the answer to show true understanding. And then the last con i see is problems are timed. And it kind of goes back to like the math anxiety a piece. When students have a short amount of time to complete something is going to incite like some students fight or flight or freeze response. So you want to be aware of which students that tends to be and either talk with them beforehand, or come up with a way to kind of work with them. And maybe that goes back to the makeup better piece of making it a team or partner base game, because that allows for collaboration and allows for more minds to be working on the same problem. And it could help reduce the anxiety of it being timed. Now one other thing with it being timed, I use timers a lot in my classroom. And I always preface it with it’s just a tool is not a law. Like if for a warmup or an activity or something I’ve given five minutes, and most kids are done in three, we’ll stop at three minutes. But if at five minutes, there’s a majority of kids who are not done yet, I’m going to extend it. So it’s not the end all be all have a five minute timer. It’s just a rough idea to keep students motivated to continue working. But it also helps me as a teacher know how much time we spent on something, and I can adjust accordingly. So if that’s the culture within your classroom, maybe the problems being timed isn’t as big of a deal. Again, it goes back to knowing your students and what works best for them. Overall, I really love the idea of the unfair game. I think it offers a lot of potential for students to be engaged and have fun with math and gain some cool prizes. You can be so creative with what prizes you give students or you have to offer students. So this is probably an eight out of 10 game for me and my classroom. And I hope you found this episode valuable. And you’re able to take this and implement it in your classroom to help students deeply understand and love math. If you would take the time, it would mean so much to me if you left a review of the solving for the undefined podcast. So more math teachers can learn and further develop skills that they can use to help students deeply understand and love math. So whatever platform you’re listening on, whether it’s Apple podcast, Spotify, or something else, I would love it if you take the time to leave a review. And with that I’ll calc-u-later.

Thank you so much for tuning into today’s episode. So to find all the links and resources to things talked about in this episode head on over to misskuipersclassroom.com and click on podcast.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai