An Algebra Game for Trinomials
March 25th, 2011
This week was the start of factoring in my algebra course and so, I’ve been building games involving factoring all week. This one is the most interesting one – it’s called Trinomial Traverse. David (one of my colleagues at MCC) and I started work on it on Tuesday with a stack of cards with monomials, binomials, and trinomials. No matter how much we pushed at it, we couldn’t get out a decent game that involved strategy. However, when I got home and raided my game design closet, I found some wooden cubes and the real game building began in earnest. What you see now is roughly version 4.
We’ve carefully balanced the board for good gameplay using the probabilities of rolling any trinomial, so I wouldn’t recommend building an alternative game board unless you “do the math” too. Please feel free to download (PDF) and use Trinomial Traverse in your own classes and let us know if you have suggestions for improving it.
David has done three class tests and recommends that you don’t suggest the students using pencil and paper (it really slowed down the game). With each role of the dice, there are only three combinations. For students, it is probably easiest if they just work out what each combination gives them (in their head) and take a look at the game board after figuring each one out. There are a few rules we have left out. For example, you may want to put a penalty in place if students forget to announce their trinomial or do it incorrectly, but we decided to leave those decisions up to you. It’s probably best (in our opinion) if the students just police each other on this one.
David and I recorded a little demo video of the game play.
One simple variation would be to play the game with “scarce resources” where all the gold is sitting on the board at the beginning of the game and can only be earned once on each space.
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I think the bumping should be in the same direction as your move – just my two cents.
Otherwise it looks like a fun activity.
Well, in all honesty, the bumping doesn’t happen all that often. It’s difficult to get (a) proximity and then (b) the right roll to land on the space occupied by someone else.
I like this alot! Do you think it could work with trinomials with leading coefficients that are not 1? Any pointers if I were to try to make such a game?
Yes. We’ve been meaning to build Trinomial Traverse II with a different set of dice for just that purpose, but I haven’t had time to build another spreadsheet of probabilities. We were actually aiming for the non-1 coefficients, but had to come up with a good game first with an easier case!