Every teacher wants their students to enjoy math class, and often they turn to games to increase student engagement. Unfortunately, many teachers see short-lived interest or have a hard time finding games that teach more than just multiplication tables. But games can be powerful educational environments for learning math if structured correctly. Over the past six years, I created and used math games in a variety of forms, from quick, five-minute, single rule games to semester-long, adventure theme games. They became central components to my classes, and during that time, my students scored well on state tests even though they generally entered our school below average.

"Do we get to play the game?" became a mantra I've heard literally thousands of times, and it's that kind of engagement, coupled with clear teaching strategies, that works to create a wonderful classroom environment.

The nice thing is, it's relatively easy. I've compiled here a list of my best suggestions to make your own game in the classroom. The truth is, anyone can design their own math games, and if you use the following template, you'll have a math game up and running in a couple of days. Fortunately, most problems are easy to avoid, and you will quickly be on your way to a new, even enchanting, approach to teaching math in your classroom.

Building a Game:

1. Pick a theme or story. It really doesn't matter what it is. Just pick something in which you are interested and go with it. From rockets to pirates to cooking to camping to fishing to the economy, you have a story to tell. And, don't worry about teaching math yet, or how it will happen. It will come.

Example Theme: We were studying the Renaissance so I decided to make a spice trading game with companies, countries and pirates.

2. Make a simple goal for the game. Again, it doesn't matter what it is, but create a simple goal for students. In competitive games, fear among students and math is highly prevalent, so if you set the goal for winning against another team, allow for some re-start mechanism.

Example Goal: Acquire spices, bring them to home port, trade them and make money to purchase supplies, and even weaponry. For the re-set, if your ship was sunk, you could borrow money from the bank to upgrade (with interest of course!).

3. Create a simple turn-based structure. Not all of my games have a turn-based structure, but most do. It's a simple way to think about games. A single "turn" in the Renaissance game Piracy was one move of their ship. Think about the math you'd like involved and keep it simple!

Example Turn: Student A purchased a "schooner" and therefore can move .7 times the wind speed. The wind speed is determined by the roll of a die. Student A rolls a 3, and therefore can move 2.1 knots/hour. This is multiplied by 24 hours so the student can travel 48 + 2.4 or 50.4 knots on that day. This gets represented on a scaled map that they make themselves. 

4. Make a platform and test it! Have your students draw a map and scale it themselves after a quick lesson. Have them practice your new game by doing something simple and non-competitive, like sailing around a buoy. Don't add more to your game just yet. Just test and revise the turn-based structure a couple of times. Don't worry about keeping track of turns either. Just let the kids move their ships. If the game has angles, give them a challenge like moving on a small board without crashing into each other.

The kids won't be "wowed" at this point, but they'll have a little fun. Don't expect miracles, yet...  

A Couple of Guidelines

1. The math must make sense as part of the story. All games have a story line, even if the story is just shooting asteroids to save yourself, and math games are notoriously designed in a way that places math as the sore thumb the story line. In "math baseball" for example, you solve a problem to get a hit, but the mathematics concept is unrelated in context to the hit (i.e.- 4 x 4 = 16 is meaningless to a second base hit). The net effect is that students not only lose interest in a shorter time, but also that their conceptual learning will be low. In Monopoly, banking is a good example of a game in which the math makes sense to the story-line.  Another example I learned at a conference, in which we used chart paper with a drawn in map of a golf course. We first had to guess the angle of our shot, then used a protractor to line up the shot on the tee, and finally we multiplied the roll of a die by inverse fraction of a "club" we chose to determine distance. It was fun, and the math concepts at least made some basic sense. A 7 iron, for example, (equal to 1/7) shot less far than a two iron (1/2). 

Part of the point is that the math doesn't have to be perfect. For example using a bow and arrow, I often use the draw weight of a bow (how much force is on the string) multiplied by the angle of the shot up to 45 degrees as the distance it shoots. Modern physics tells us that the equation is much, much more complex. But, for a middle-school student, they understand that a 30 degree shot from a 30 pound bow will go further than a 20 degree shot from a 20 pound bow, and it makes sense. You've got them thinking.

2. Stay away from games where the math is totally arbitrary. It is the flip side of guideline 1, but too often the game becomes something like the following: solve this problem, get this prize. Not only does it miss the conceptual teaching you were hoping for, but your students will tire of this approach and you've actually done some harm-- the inherent message is, math isn't worth doing for its own sake, so we must then give an arbitrary reward. 

3. Choose a story-line, any story line, and then create a simple, repetitive, coherent way for math to be embedded. If all these guidelines sound the same, they are. As one of my mentors has said, "Learning is not just learning new things, but learning the same thing in a deeper, more meaningful way." (Dr. Art Combs) If you are designing from scratch, you can come up with just about any idea and build a math game around it. The richness around a subject will come as you study it more.