Introduction

Talk about a hit…this is one of my students’ favorite games, and we shoehorn it into every concept we can in class. This is the original concept that I created it for: Significant figures.

After spending a few years teaching sigfigs, then giving them a few worksheets to practice it, I began to start mixing the practice sessions up. I tried stations, which were ok, and some type of race game that was fun, but didn’t really help them much. Finally, I came up with SlapJack for sigfigs!

Materials and Setup

Just need to print and cut out the included cards --- 1 set for each group in class

Overview

This is a competitive group game where individual students will compete against the other members of their group. A detailed explanation of the rules is included with the purchase, but the overview is this:

Students will be dealt a handful of cards each with random numbers in various amounts of sigfigs. One at a time, they'll quickly lay down one card on the corner of their desk where others can see it. This will continue until two numbers with the same amount of sigfigs are laid back to back. As soon as they recognize it, they have to slap their pile! Last one there's a rotten egg...

****Important Note: For a whole host of reasons, we don’t want students slapping other students’ hands. If you have them lay their cards down at the innermost corner of their own desk, then when it comes time to slap the cards, they can slap their own pile only, not one collective pile, so that no one is hitting anyone else****

The best part is that in the fallout from each slap, there has to be a discussion from the group on whether the slap was right or not. This means they're learning while they play, and I'll take that all day every day!