We miss a huge opportunity if we merely play games, but never use those games as a way to move students toward higher levels of thinking as well as abstraction.
Here’s the framework I would use:
- Introduce a simple game (say, The Game of 100 or Heaps).
- Allow students to play through a few times; long enough to get the hang of the rules. On Bloom’s we’d be at Remember/Understand
- Then, ask them to start looking for patterns. What sorts of sequences lead to victory/defeat? This would be the Analyze level of Bloom’s.
- Use those patterns to formulate a strategy to follow. Perhaps write a one-sentence goal. (In chess, “Control the center of the board” or “Never move backwards.”) This would be the Synthesize level.
- Most of the games I’ve written about have simple enough rules that you can make small modifications. Change something about how the game is played.
- The Game of 100 can become The Game of 77.
- Heaps can change to have 5 piles.
- Now, students can play the modified game and see how their strategy works/fails. How could they adapt their previous strategy to work under the new rules? Students are getting more abstract in their thinking.
- Could we find certain strategies that work across games? In both chess and tic-tac-toe, it’s beneficial to control the center of the board. Is that true in other games as well?
In this way, playing games becomes practice for higher-level, abstract thinking.