Introducing the game of Hex to my younger son

I recently got a book about the game of Hex:

Got this book on Hex yesterday. Hoping to figure out a couple of project to introduce kids the game and some of the interesting math in it pic.twitter.com/zFq4B8OgeK

— Mike Lawler (@mikeandallie) January 19, 2020

I’m hoping to be able to use some ideas form the book for fun projects with the boys. Today I thought it would be fun to introduce the game and try out a challenge problem from the book. It was an interesting project – the game was harder for my son to think about than I was expecting, but I have some new ideas to try out now.

Here’s how today went -> first an introduction and a quick game:

Now we talked a bit about what he thought some good strategies would be and we played again:

Next we tried a challenge problem – it was pretty difficult, but gave rise to some really good discussion. Here’s the first 5 min of thinking about it:

Finally, here’s the rest of the discussion on the challenge problem – I had to give the answer, but we did play it out from there:

I think playing around with this game is going to be fun. I definitely didn’t gauge the difficulty of the challenge problem correctly. Hopefully I’ll figure out how to use the problems from the book a bit better in future projects.