Guess Who- Linear Functions

I was hopping around the MTBoS this afternoon and I happened to reread a post by Sarah from several months ago in which she listed some thrift store/garage sale finds she was planning to use in her classroom. Among those finds was a Guess Who? board game which reminded me that I had purchased the same thing a long time ago and hadn't yet remade it into a math game.  

Guess Who? was a staple in my house when I was a child and I can remember toting it to many a babysitting gig, too.  It was perfect as a two-player game since I was an only child and just had to find one other person to play. I always wanted to be Maria because she looked the most like me, even with the funny green beret, and I learned a lot about probability by calculating the best questions to ask in order to eliminate about half of the people at a time.  

Sorry for doubling up on Made4Math this week, but I couldn't bear to wait for next Monday to write my post after making this beauty!  

Here's what my $3 at Goodwill and several hours of my evening got me:

Truth be told, the red one's not done yet.  :)

The family that owned this game before me must have been a tiny bit compulsive. ;) They had glued the character cards to the yellow flippers. I pried each one loose and then slid my card in along with the character card. The back of the flippers show the question mark design of the Guess Who cards and I was able to use cheap paper instead of thick card stock.

If you want to make your own set on another topic, just measure the cards and make a table with cells that size. I found these cards were 1 1/8" wide and 1 3/8" tall, but be sure to check if you have a different model of the game. The one I had as a kid had much larger cards.  Before I had this game board, I made a paper version using file folders for linear inequalities in my first year of teaching and it has been a classroom staple.  I made it all by hand, so I might not be able to blog it for a while.

I'm sharing the files I made below. Included are directions for how your students could play this game even without the game board. After all, this is cute, but who is going to buy a class set, right? I figure I'll make this one cute, draw a couple of kids names to play with this set, and let the rest of the kids play the modified way.  Now that I know I can modify them, I'll pick up another set or two if I see them at Goodwill again because I'd like to make one for quadratic functions for my Algebra class.  





This game ties in nicely to a couple of 8th grade standards:

• CCSS.Math.Content.8.F.A.2 Compare properties of two functions each represented in a different way (algebraically, graphically, numerically in tables, or by verbal descriptions). For example, given a linear function represented by a table of values and a linear function represented by an algebraic expression, determine which function has the greater rate of change.
• CCSS.Math.Content.8.F.B.4 Construct a function to model a linear relationship between two quantities. Determine the rate of change  and initial value of the function from a description of a relationship or from two (x, y) values, including reading these from a table or from a graph. Interpret the rate of change and initial value of a linear function in terms of the situation it models, and in terms of its graph or a table of values.

How have you repurposed games in your classroom?

Mathematically yours, 

Miss B