Why Playful Math Instead of Mathematical Play?
Most research on mathematical play investigates the math that arises from young children's play, or from people's play in informal learning environments, such as video games or maker spaces. As a field, we know less about the mathematical play that happens with the math topics that students and teachers have to navigate in classroom settings - probably because classroom math tasks aren't always very playful! We use the term playful math instead of mathematical play in order to highlight the potential of playifying classroom math tasks; we find ways to make math more playful.
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Here is one way we've playified a covariation graphing task. Imagine you have a movie of a shape that sweeps out from left to right, like this:
Typically we would have students look at the shape and then graph the length (on the x-axis) compared to the area (on the y-axis). We turned this task into a "guess my shape" game, in which students team up and each team creates a challenge for the other team. They will create a shape-graph pair and then give either just the shape or just the graph to the other team. The other team has to generate the missing shape or graph, and check that it matches up. Here are some of the creative shape challenges and graph challenges our students have made. See if you can come up with the associated graph or shape for each one!
