Saw this tweet from Dan Anderson yesterday:
He’d been inspired by an article that Tim Chartier post to make an interactive Light’s out game.
There’s no school today so my wife and kids are heading up to New Hampshire for a hike, so I used Dan’s program for a light little morning project with the boys.
I just showed them the game and had them play around. It gave them an opportunity to talk about how the game works and talk a little about the strategy for winning the game.
Two things were interesting to me:
(1) My older son sort of got stuck on, or maybe “anchored to” is better, one of the patterns, thinking that figuring out how to solve this particular pattern was the key to solving the game. It was interesting for me to see how his thoughts about that pattern sort of stopped him from exploring the game more.
(2) My younger son noticed a connection to the “checker stacks” game we explored a little last week. That was neat because that connection does provide an interesting way to analyze the game.
Our check stack blog posts are here:
Walking down the path the surreal numbers Part 1
Walking down the path to the surreal numbers Part 2
So, below are their thoughts on Dan’s game – two (roughly) 5 minute videos from each kid.
Older son’s thoughts:
Younger Son’s thoughts:
Mike's Math Page 