This week we studied measurement as well as Mean, Median, and Mode. Although the mean, median, and mode game may not have been the most popular with the class, i liked it. So, i thought that it would be a cool idea to try and teach my little brother JJ the game.
It took awhile to try and explain the rules to JJ. One we finally convinced my boyfriend and other brother to join, we had enough people to play.
What i noticed, is that the three times around of just putting the cards in seemed to lose his attention at first. I urged him to keep going and that he would see the point shortly. One we all put our cards in, I asked JJ what the median of all the cards were. One thing that we ran into was that JJ had the meaning of mean, median, and mode mixed up (just as many students do). So this was a good opportunity to be able to assess the students on their understanding of mean, median, and mode. The first one that i thought would be helpful to illustrate the meaning of was median. Since the cards were in a horizontal layout, it was easy to pull the cards away until you have the middle card.
After that, we tackled mode. I explained that mode meant.. "most" in this case their wasn't any mode but I explained that if there had been two kings or two 2's that would have been our mode. Then we talked about mean. JJ knew what mean was so after he told me that he added up all the numbers and divided by how many cards there were.
After the round was over and we added up all the points, JJ came ahead by 2. When he won the round, he truly became invested in the game. All of the sudden he wanted to play another round. I'm not sure if his competitiveness took over or if it was a matter of enjoying the game. -Also, we added a speed concept to the game. the first one to get the mean correctly without a calculator got a point. That made JJ especially invested.
In class, we discussed that this game wasn't particularly exciting. I wonder if that was the case because we all understand mean, median, and mode pretty well. I question this because when i played it with JJ, who was still learning, it was alot of fun and interesting to watch him like the game.
I think that i would want to use this game in my classroom. I think its a good assessment of understanding as well as review. If you add in special elements according to the students such as speed, it makes it much more exciting.