{"id":231,"date":"2014-07-07T10:05:05","date_gmt":"2014-07-07T10:05:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/newblog.primefactorisation.com\/2014\/07\/07\/algebra-snap\/"},"modified":"2024-11-02T15:04:45","modified_gmt":"2024-11-02T20:04:45","slug":"algebra-snap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.primefactorisation.com\/blog\/2014\/07\/07\/algebra-snap\/","title":{"rendered":"Algebra snap"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Only a week left of school holidays. I&#8217;d better get started on the huge list of things I mean to do over the break!<\/p>\n<p>I spent some time at school today working on an idea I had last week. My next topic with year nine (once we properly finish off Pythagoras) will be Expanding and Factorising. I plan to include some work on simplifying expressions, but I&#8217;ve noticed that some students struggle with recoginising &#8216;like&#8217; terms. Some get mixed up between terms like <em>x<\/em> and <em>x<\/em><sup>2<\/sup> terms, and some don&#8217;t realise the differences between terms at all and try to do things like 4<em>x<\/em>&nbsp;+&nbsp;5<em>y<\/em>&nbsp;=&nbsp;9<em>xy<\/em>. I wanted an activity that let students practise recognising when terms are like or not.<\/p>\n<p>So I came up with &#8220;Algebra Snap&#8221;:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/content\/images\/2014\/Jul\/algebra_snap.jpg\" alt=\"algebra snap\" \/><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s basically what it sounds like &#8211; &#8220;Snap&#8221;, but with matching like terms instead of numbers. (<del>Everyone knows how to play Snap, don&#8217;t they?<\/del> EDIT: Sorry, I shouldn&#8217;t make assumptions like that! I&#8217;ve tried to explain it below.) I haven&#8217;t had a chance to test it out yet, but I&#8217;ll post here again once I&#8217;ve used it in class. The cards are simply laminated coloured paper, with different colours so I don&#8217;t get the sets mixed up.<\/p>\n<p>An extension to this activity could be to play the game the same way, except that students have to state the sum of the cards they&#8217;re snapping before they get it.<\/p>\n<p>Even though I&#8217;ve printed &#8220;Algebra Snap&#8221; on the back of the cards, I hope there will be chances to reuse them in other activities too. One idea I had was something around factorising &#8211; draw two cards, and have students decide whether they can be factorised or not (and have them do the factorisation). I wish I&#8217;d planned the coefficients a bit better &#8211; if I&#8217;d used 6 more often instead of 5 and 7, then there would be more opportunities to factorise. I guess that&#8217;s what permanent markers are for.<\/p>\n<p>If you have any other ideas for these cards, or any improvements, let me know!<\/p>\n<p><strong>Downloads<\/strong> (both files are the same thing, but last page of the Word document looks weird unless you fix up the font):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dropbox.com\/s\/3xizhw1cv2up6ra\/algebra%20snap.pdf\">algebra snap.pdf<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dropbox.com\/s\/imtk1w5e90mcqho\/algebra%20snap.docx\">algebra snap.docx<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>EDIT: How to play Snap:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Divide the cards between each player, who holds them face down.<\/li>\n<li>Players take turns to reveal the top card and place it in a stack in front of them.<\/li>\n<li>If at any point two stacks have matching cards (in this case, cards with like terms), the first player to shout &#8220;Snap!&#8221; wins both stacks and places them at the bottom of their hand. (Don&#8217;t shout if you don&#8217;t want to disturb the rest of the school. But it&#8217;s more fun if you shout.)<\/li>\n<li>The winner is the player to get all the cards.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There are rules for dealing with wrong and tied calls, but there seem to be many different versions around &#8211; google it to find one you like. The version I played growing up involved everyone putting their cards into one stack, which would be won by yelling &#8220;Snap!&#8221; and slapping your hand onto the stack if the last two cards match. It used to get a little violent, so it probably isn&#8217;t a good way to play with rowdy 15 year olds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Only a week left of school holidays. I&#8217;d better get started on the huge list of things I mean to do over the break! I spent some time at school today working on an idea I had last week. My next topic with year nine (once we properly finish off Pythagoras) will be Expanding and &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.primefactorisation.com\/blog\/2014\/07\/07\/algebra-snap\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Algebra snap&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.primefactorisation.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.primefactorisation.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.primefactorisation.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.primefactorisation.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.primefactorisation.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.primefactorisation.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":718,"href":"https:\/\/www.primefactorisation.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions\/718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.primefactorisation.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.primefactorisation.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.primefactorisation.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}