Tag Archives: game

Bracketology


The Description

Bracketology is a review game based on the NCAA basketball tournanment.  Basically you pick problems, setup the bracket, and the goal of the game is to figure out which is the most difficult problem.   You setup the intial matches, and then students use whiteboards to vote for the most difficult problem.  Then they work the losing problem on a piece of paper.  Here’s how it works:

– Intially pick 4 problems from the first part of a chapter, and then 4 problems from the second part of a chapter.  Then rank them from #1-4 based on how difficult you think the problems are.  The #1 seed should be the problem you consider most difficult of the group, the 4th seed should be the easiest.

– Draw the bracket on the whiteboard, the highest seed should play the lowest seed, so put #1 vs #4 and #2 vs #3.

– Have students in groups of two.  Each group gets one whiteboard, and each student needs their own piece of paper.

– Pick a match and have each group use their whiteboard to vote for the problem they think is the most difficult.

– The winning problem is the one that is voted the most difficult.  Take that problem and draw it into the next round.  All the students should work on the losing problem.

– When you finally get to a champion problem, offer extra credit to any student who can take down the champion.

The Advice

– I would write on the whiteboard the two basic steps that the students are doing:
1. Vote for most difficult problem.
2. Work on the losing problem.

– That above advice is key because students will get confused intially about which problem they should be working on.

– I have two whiteboards in my room.  I use on of them for the bracket, and then I work the problems on the other.

The Goods

I do not use any handouts with this game.  Students take out their own piece of paper and I write the problems all on the whiteboard.

 

Macro-Differentiation

These are a listing of hastags that I use to catagorize my lessons plans.  Each catagory represents a different style lesson plan.  My instructional goal is typically to make sure that I use each hashtag at least once a month.  The goal of this blog is to share all the lesson plans that I use under each hashtag.

My detailed lesson plans are my Keynote slides.  But along with those, I make a quick, calendar-style overview to me a general idea of what I am doing.  It’s on this calender where I place the hashtags at the bottom of each day.  This allows me  to quickly look back at what I have been doing, and know whether of not I am differentiating.  For example, here is two weeks worth of my lesson plans in geometry.  Notice that I can quickly see whether or not I have differentiated my instruction, without having to analyze each specific lesson plan.  The hashtags allow me to get a quick sense of what I have been doing, and what I have not been doing.

 

*Notes –

-The term “perplexity” is being used as described by Dan Meyer here