Back To School: mathcurious.com

0:10 welcome to brains on games i'm dr brian mcdonald and it's still back to school season here at brains on games so today we're going to talk about a couple of math games recently i was lucky enough to receive in the mail a couple of games from the folks over at mathcurius.com and we're going to start with a little game called chicken escape chicken escape is a game that works with kids age six and up it's for between two and six players and you can play it in 15 minutes to half an hour let's take a look at chicken escape i mean first of all if we're talking about a game that has crazy chicken cartoons on the cards that's of interest to me automatically but the idea here is that you've got these cards in your deck they're numbered from one to ten and what you have to do is use three or fewer cards that will add up to ten in order to um play those cards get them out of your hand you start with a hand of six cards you're trying to get your hand down to zero so you do that by adding up to ten so this is a game that is about mental math calculations but for the younger kids or the kids that are still becoming familiar with with the mental math you've got tomatoes here on the cards that you can count so they're using their tomato energy to escape from the chicken coop now there are a few extra cards that add some wrinkles to the game but it is a pretty simple set collecting

1:42 game it's just that your sets are three or fewer cards that add up to ten you've got a mega tomato which is a wild card you can use that as any number but you can kind of mess with the other players by um skipping their turn uh using a pig you can make the other players draw cards you can ask a player for one of his or her cards you can play the farmer uh and now you're making the the player draw a couple of cards you can make all the players draw one card with the angry geese uh and finally the rooster is the card that cancels all those other ones so um you've got lots of different ways to mess with the other players but the idea here is that you're doing those basic addition calculations and you're trying to add up to 10 so you're always going to be able to count up to those totals on your fingers so a good game for the younger crowd all right let's talk about dragon times here's a game for two or more players it's for age six and up but it is a multiplication game so most of the kids i know who are six years old don't know multiplication yet but i'll show you in a second there's a little bit of a cheat sheet you can play this game well how long it takes depends on how skilled you are at multiplication i would say now i did get called out after the last video i got called out to help out a neighbor so uh you could see that i've changed what i'm wearing and that's the reason why let's take a look at dragon time so you've got these dragons and they're going to be laid out

3:13 on a tableau there's going to be eight of them at a time and then you're going to have six of these spell cards you'll start with six spell cards in your hand so the important thing about the spell cards is the numbers that are on the cards what you're trying to do uh with your six cards is uh put together a set that when you multiply the numbers so in this case we'll say a seven and a three when you multiply these two numbers together they'll match the number on one of these dragons that allows you to free the dragon from captivity and so then you get to take the dragon over onto your side once one of the players has run out of cards you move to the second phase of this game so the first phase is just figuring out the multiplication uh and there is like i said a cheat sheet a multiplication chart that's included in fact there's two of them that are included in the game so you know the younger kids can learn how to use that the the times table to figure out what their cards will multiply up to once you're done that phase the next part is this one you've got a spinner so you've you've freed these dragons now you need to tame them so you're going to have some dragons you know now they're in your hand or they're on your side of the table you start to spin that spinner and that's going to determine what kind of dragon you can tame

4:44 so if it's a square number then you'd be good to go with the number 25 so i would be lucky in that case if you land on this this space here that says evil swap spell you're going to trade your stack of dragons with another player it sort of goes around the circle if there are multiple players in the game so you want to find multiples of 10 multiples of 4 seven you know so that's what you're spinning on this spinner so the kids are really going to be thinking about what numbers multiply together maybe they'll remember what numbers they used to to free that dragon so that it was in their hand uh but you'll be thinking about what numbers multiply together to allow you to train these dragons and then the game ends uh and you you know the person who's trained the most dragons or tamed the most dragons is the one who's going to win the game so there you have it a couple of math games from mathcurius.com um you've got the addition one you've got a multiplication one and e and and the multiplication one will even look at square numbers and things like that so uh it's you know the perfect kinds of games to have in a classroom when the kids are done their math work they could do a little bit of extra math but it feels a bit more like a game now if you have any questions or comments or suggestions for me as always you can find me at brian at brainsongames.ca brainsongames.ca of course is the

6:15 website where you can find past videos and future videos will be posted there too uh brains on games is the twitter handle and the instagram feed and the facebook page and if you like this video and you'd like to be notified of future ones you can head on over to youtube and click that subscribe button thanks for joining me today and hopefully you'll be back next time you