Use a hundred board (like the one below) or the snake board shown on other posts.  Roll dice and if you land on a multiple of 5, everyone gives you a kiss. 

Alternatively, place a Hersey’s Kiss chocolate on all squares with a multiple of five.  Play up and down the board (add until you get to 100 and subtract until you get back to zero) until all of the chocolates are eaten.

Husband has always liked the show “The Dukes of Hazzard”.  I realise it’s not the most PC of shows, but he’s not American and doesn’t really carry that baggage.  He just likes the car chases.

As part of my hobby/research, I’ve been having immense fun working my way through an amazing book called Challenges for Games Designers: Non-Digital Exercises for Video Game Designers by Brenda Brathwaite and Ian Schreiber.  I found one that suggested using the Dukes of Hazzard brand to create a monopoly game.  I didn’t exactly end up doing that because I couldn’t really see Bo and Luke buying up property. 

Instead, I wanted to practice adding and subtracting to 20 with Child, so I came up with the basic mechanic of rolling a single die and running around the circle to find the sum or difference.  

Then I thought about the characters: Bo and Luke would be trying to sell moonshine and Hogg would be doing something nasty to make money like repossessing houses.  They’re both doing illegal things so if they run into each other they both get caught for their crimes.

I’ve made two versions of this game.

For the plain math game, you’ll need cards marked 1-20 placed around the perimeter of a table in random order.

Choose a number to start on.  Each player rolls a die and decides whether to add it to or subtract it from the number at their position.  Do the calculation and run to the next number.  The game ends when both players land on the same square and «catch» each other.

For the storied version, you will also need the following pieces: 20 houses (monopoly houses work), 20 pennies and twenty bottles (use small toothpicks or «men» from another game).  It’s fun if you use toy cars as avatars, in the spirit of the show.

Put numbers 1-20 on cards and place them  in random order around the perimeter of a table.  Place one card marked Daisy and another marked Roscoe in the center. Each numbered card has a house and a penny.  To move, the characters roll a die and add or subtract from their current number and go to that card.

The players play on two teams: Luke and Bo Duke on one and Hogg and Enos on the other.  Each team chooses any number as a starting point.

When the player(s) in the role of Luke and Bo Duke land on a square, they leave a bottle and take the penny. If they land on Daisy (rolling a 6), they leave their bottles and pennies safely.  If they land on Roscoe (rolling a 1) they lose their bottles and pennies.

When Hogg lands on a square, he takes the house.  If he lands on Roscoe he leaves his houses safely, if he lands on Daisy he has to give her the houses he has taken to that point.

The game ends when they land on same square and catch each other.

Child is very story oriented so I try to make math games around that idea.

I noticed she was having trouble skip counting by twos, though she can skip count other numbers like 3, 5 and 10 easily. I also wanted her to make the connection with evens and odds, which, surprisingly, she does seem to understand quite well.

She started by drawing a picture of a girl named Flower. We wanted to know what Flower likes/dislikes. But Flower can’t talk, she can only give us a yes or no through a special sign: we have to flip cards (ordinary playing cards without faces will do) and add them up. If the number is even, the answer is «yes», if odd, «no».

As it turned out Flower liked broccoli but not ice cream, and dogs but not cats.

Tomorrow, we plan to see if Flower and her friend like and dislike the same things. This is a rather sneaky way to repeat the whole exercise and give her more practice!

An apocryphal story has it that a White European is in a small village in Africa and sees a group of local children.  He wants to interact with them and give them something fun to do, so he says through his translator,

“Let’s play a game.  You all race to that tree over there, and the winner gets this bag of candy.”

What happens next surprises him.  Instead of racing each other to the tree, all of the children join hands and run together.  They all get to the tree at the same time.  The man is puzzled as to who deserves the candy but the children explain, “We all won so we can share the candy!”.

This story describes the basic tenets of the Ubuntu philosophy: «I am because we are» and “humanity towards others”.  The tale can be read in different ways, of course: a kindly gentleman playing with children; a White European man trying to impose his “superior” ways on an African community of children who already know exactly how they like to play; an honest misunderstanding based on a clash of cultures, etc.  However, in this book, I would like to take this story to validate a different way of defining “game”.

With the “globalization” of our worldview, most people in the world nowadays share a cultural background more in common with the European man in the story than with the African children, at least where games are concerned.  This means we tend to define games as in the definitions above: there must, at the very least, be recognizable rules, goals and some sort of win/loss end-state.  This assumption is clear in the story.  The man had a certain pre-defined concept of the meanings of words like “race” and “win”, so he assumed that each child would run individually and that one would necessarily reach the tree first.  The children seemed to agree that “race” means “run as fast as you can” but they obviously interpreted the pronoun in the plural as in “as fast as we all can if we join hands”.  They also interpreted “win” very differently; in their view, there is no limit on how many people can win because whoever fulfills the condition of running to the tree is entitled to some of the candy. 

This begs an interesting question to which the story offers two seemingly irreconcilable answers: what does it really mean to win?  According to the man’s worldview, each child should aim to maximize the amount of candy they get, so it would logically be in the interest of each to run faster than the others in order to get all of the reward.  From the children’s point of view, winning should make one happy, but one child cannot be happy eating candy while looking at the faces of all her companions who have none. 

This is not some sort of idealization of a so-called primitive or child-like worldview, though the characters’ backgrounds may make it seem so because of their respective ages and cultural backgrounds.   Rather it is based on a firm scientific understanding of the human brain in social settings and of how empathy is activated through a phenomenon known as “mirror neurons”. 

To illustrate, let’s look at another story, this one taking place in a laboratory at the University of Parma in Italy, where a neuroscientist named Giacomo Rizzolatti and his graduate students were studying a monkey with electrodes wired up to its brain.  One of the graduates began to lick an ice-cream cone in front of the monkey.  To everyone’s surprise, the exact same regions of the monkey’s brain showed activity as if the monkey itself was performing the action.  A great deal of research followed this discovery, papers were published, and books written.  Some of the books and articles produced outside of the academic realm were complete junk, of course, suggesting that somehow, we are all connected at these deep-down levels and isn’t it all groovy, man?

The science itself, however, is sound.  The “mirror neurons” exist to allow us to empathize with others.  If you’re sad, you’ll bring me down; if I see you stub your toe, I’ll wince.  Babies in a nursery with another baby who is crying will cry too.  Rifkin calls this “empathic distress”.  The point is that those of us who are not psychopaths or otherwise psychologically impaired can feel what others are feeling because we are social creatures.  “We are soft wired to experience another’s plight as if we are experiencing it ourselves” (Jeremy Rifkin)

What’s interesting is that, as adults, we sometimes have to force ourselves to deliberately turn this compassion off.   You simply can’t give money to every beggar on the street, you can’t let your heart bleed every time you see images of suffering on the news, otherwise you’ll drive yourself literally insane.  Children don’t necessarily filter their experiences in this way.

Empathy is a strong drive whose purpose is to enable us to belong to a group.  Empathy in children is a value we can appreciate and encourage.  Childhood is a special time of life where you shouldn’t need to live and die by the sword.  Childhood should be a time for socialization through play. 

Play is fun. But what makes playing a game fun for the players? 

Richard Bartle defined four different “types” of players, rather cutely matching them up to suites of a deck of playing cards:

• Diamonds refer to players who play to win.  They play by the rules and they keep the goal in mind every step of the way.  They expect other players to do the same, so to them a good game is one where the players win or lose fair and square.
• Clubs are players who don’t care so much about winning per se as about beating the other players.  They often measure how much fun they had by how much damage they caused to other players.
• Spades are the explorers.  The rules and goals of the game aren’t nearly so interesting as the game-world itself.  They’re the ones who will often contribute arcane knowledge to game wikis online.  They might not even play at all.  One player described his experience with Myst and Riven back when they came out in the early and late 1990s respectively: he wasn’t at all interested in playing the game, he just wanted to explore the beautiful sets, opening doors and exploring game-world locations.
• Hearts are the socialisers.  The game is just an excuse to get together with people.  Jane McGonigal noted that a large demographic of people playing Words with Friends and other online and social media-based games do so simply to stay in touch with loved ones, and that the most common comments in the chat features were variations on “I love you, Mom!”

So, in a nutshell, what we have are roughly half of players (depending on the game genre) who don’t even care that much about winning, and even less about playing by specific rules or goals.  This is amazing to me because it validates what the children in our story meant when they chose to run to the tree holding hands.

So let’s consider our littlest hearts and spades: our young children who may prefer to use games as a tool for exploration or socialization rather than competition. 

Explorers might enjoy playing with the pieces outside of the context of the game.  They might want to make up their own games with them, or use them to tell stories.  Sometimes they might become interested in a particular theme they were exposed to through a game and will want to read books or watch documentaries that tie in. 

Socialisers will enjoy playing with other people in a friendly, non-competitive atmosphere.  After all, from a child’s point of view, it’s wonderful to spend time playing a game with a parent or relative who gives them their undivided attention.  Socialisers will also enjoy playing games ABOUT people.  Games about famous people or made-up characters invite empathy, and a game centered precisely on making these game pieces happy will feel fun and satisfying Ina different kind of way.

A game with these ideas is still a game in the sense that there are rules and goals and these are important for children to deal with.  Free play is necessary and wonderful in its own right, but it won’t usually incorporate the math curriculum our children need to master as part of their education. 

Yet most games involving math, whether they are deliberately math-focussed such as Sum Swamp or Prime Climb,  or whether they simply happen to include math as a by-product such as backgammon or Monopoly, are competitive. 

I say we rethink what a game can be, and especially what a math game can be.  Let’s consider children who are curious and empathic.  Let’s consider parents who are, for whatever reason, math averse, yet want to play with their children.  For these players, we can find a different definition of play. 

In this blog, I define the parameters of the games in the following way: each game must involve  math, it must arouse empathy through  a theme, and it must consist of an interesting, yet easily made or purchased set of game pieces. 

The math parameter involves teaching different concepts such as number reading (the difference between 24 and 42, for example), subitizing (that 3+4 is the same as 5+2), sequencing, adding, subtracting, geometry, and other basic math elements suitable for children aged 5-8.  Each game will have a short explanation of the type of math required and why it is necessary. 

Each game must arouse empathy by having a theme.  The theme can involve fictional characters by having the players decide who should be on which football team, it can arouse historical empathy by exploring the world of real historical figures such as Sacajawea or Che Guevara, or it can simply be based on the relationships between players.  In this book, each game will include a clear explanation of the theme, along with additional resources in case your child wants to know more.

Finally, the pieces must be both easy to make (or inexpensive to buy), and fun to play with.  In fact, making them can be half the fun, as with some of the card games or the ones involving paper dolls.  Again, a detailed explanation of the game pieces will be included, along with links to templates or ready-made sets if they exist.

Each game will include a clear set of instructions and rules.  Within these, you and your child can feel free to explore the space of possibility as you wish.  Once you’ve tried the games as they are described, you might have ideas for modifying them.  You might play a game once and decide you’ve gotten all there is to be had out of it, while others can be played over and over.

The most important thing is to enjoy this precious time with your child whether you’re a full-time stay-at-home homeschooling parent, or whether you have just a few short hours a week to be together.  Show your child that math is fun and not to be feared.  Show her that a little empathy goes a long way.  Teach her, bond with her, and above all, love her in the way that only you can.