MATH GAMES FOR TWO PLAYERS

In the contribution we introduce interactive mathematical games intended for two players or two teams of players. These games can be used for remarkable training mathematical skills in the class. These games bring joy, enthusiasm and originality to the education. The games are in PDF format.

Two games are introduced: a Triangle game and a Jeopardy game.

The gameboard of the Triangle game has the triangular shape with 21 fields. The player wins a field if he or she gives a correct answer to the multichoice question associated to that field. The answers are graded automatically without assistance of a teacher or judge. A funny feature of the game is that the winning strategy does not include just mathematical knowledge but also a careful choice of questions.

The Jeopardy game consists of 12 questions divided into four different categories. There are three questions of different difficulty in each category. The players choose questions and by giving the answers they either win or loose the value of the question. Like in the Triangle game, the questions are multichoice question and the answers are graded without participation of the teacher.

The authors of the contribution authored set of 50 Triangle games and 100 Jeopardy games. These games are free for students and teachers and cover the high school curriculum (age between 15 and 18).

The smaller number of Triangle games is allowed by a unique feature of this game: the game never turns into the same competition. The file includes a database of questions which exceeds the number of the fields. These questions are assigned to the fields on gameboard by a random generator when the game is opened. Consequently, the same group of students can repeatedly work with the same game without fear from repeating questions.

The games are distributed as PDF files and each game is a single file. This simplifies the distribution and utilization of the games. Thanks to PDF format, there is only a minor system requirement to run the games: the installation of Adobe Reader. This requirement can be satisfied easily on any common IT platform. The PDF format also allows to enjoy the high quality vector graphics, professional typography for both plain text and mathematical expressions and perfect positioning of any element on the page. This results in a catchy outputs with professional look. Finally, the PDF specification includes interactive JavaScripts and layers with controllable visibility. This allows to build interactive materials which have full usability even without Internet access.

The tools used to prepare the materials, namely the pdfLaTeX typesetting system, the AcroTeX education bundle and a custom set of macros written by the team members will be shortly introduced in the final part of the contribution. Among others, we explain the reasons for utilizing these tool and emphasize their advantages.

The games introduced in this contribution present a part of a bigger project Stem4youth located at the homepage http://www.stem4youth.eu. Another selection of the outputs from this project, the games for one player, is described in a separate contribution “Math games for one player”.