It was only a matter of time before the SNAP Math Fair was taken over by gamers.
For the third annual edition at Contentnea-Savannah K-8 School, students decided the fair’s theme – the top choice out of 10 possibilities “by an overwhelming margin,” said math teacher and fair organizer Amy White – should be video games.
Then they spent about a month using their iPads and the basic computer coding skills they’d been practicing to create some brain twisters designed to stump schoolmates who toured the fair throughout the day on Thursday.
Fourth grader Luke Graham used Apple’s Pages app to create a digital logic puzzle around Pokémon characters. To show players how the game worked and post the rules, he built a cardboard display version. How long did it take him to make the display? “About three days,” Luke said. And the iPad game? “About a day (in class).”
Fifth graders Jarod Carlyle and Jackson Heath played off the game Clash of Clan’s goal of building a defensible community, but actually they were demonstrating some basic concepts of geometry and problem solving. How do you make a pyramid out of a linear arrangement of Styrofoam balls? An adult giving it a try had some difficulty. “Second graders are really good at this,” Jarod said.
Other games tested players’ skills in math concepts like estimation and the number sense required to solve a Sudoku puzzle.
Sixteen students in the CSS fair will take their games to a regional math fair at East Carolina University next week.