Dotty six

Ok, mathematicians to play this game, you need some coloured pencils and markers, some paper and three sets of number cards showing one to six. It's OK if you don't have those things yet. You can press pause and go get them now and come back and play or watch how to play the game and prepare your materials when you're ready to play too. Here we go!

Hello young mathematicians! We thought we'd share a game with you today called 'Dotty 6' that we learned about from 'nrich mathematics'. So to play 'Dotty 6', you need a game board and your game board that looks like a noughts and crosses board.

It's a very similar game and we need some different coloured markers to represent the two teams that are playing. So today there's the Orange Team who I'm going to represent with this guy here, you might know him, and the Black Team, who of course there's no one else that you could represent him with is there, apart from Batman, and we also need some cards to play with, so in this case we need cards with numbers on them 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, so we each had a go at drawing or making some of our cards that we would play with. You can see there's different sets here, and we each made our own set from one to six and then we're going to shuffle them altogether, so that we have enough cards to play our game with.

Alright, let's play. Who should start? You're right! Batman, 'cause he's the best superhero. We can debate that later, ok. And... they got a one. So the first thing that the Batman Team has to do, is record down their one, and then think about where they would like to put it in their game. So they might go up here.

OK, and now it's time for the Orange Team. And they got a four and they might put their dots... here. OK. Black Team's turn and they got another one. They might put their one... here. So you can put the dots in any box. It doesn't matter if someone has already used it.

Now the Orange Team, Iron Man's team got a six. Now they can't put it here or here because it would be too many dots. You can only have six in each of the nine boxes, so they might go... here. It's a good move actually.

Alright, and Batman's team oops, sorry, forgot to record their six, Batman's team got a two, and they might go here.

Ok, Orange Team's turn again.

Oh, oh, three, and look, there's a three here, so they're going to record their three and make another collection of six.

That's getting close now because someone might be able to soon get 3 sixes in a row. OK.

Batman now got a four.

Whoops. OK, Iron Man, your turn.

And he got a two, he's getting a lot of luck.

Lucky Batman's got more skills.

Let's go.

And Batman got a six! So he also got lucky. So actually what happens now is that Bat Team could win in two ways. They could put six dots here 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and get 3 sixes in a row, they could also go here 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and get six in a row. Which one do you think they should choose?

The diagonal? Ok. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and when you get 3 sixes in a row, or you claim this spot for 3 sixes in a row, you win.

Congratulations Batman! Thank you, Iron Man.

Over to you to play Little Mathematicians!

First, if you'd like to learn more about the rules, you could click pause here and reenter the screen or follow the link to the 'nrich' site.

This game is really useful for helping young learners with some key mathematical skills including cardinality, counting, representations and combining quantities. Like this game, like many others, is really useful help for helping students develop mathematical reasoning, as they learn to strategise and increase their chances of winning. Games provide really powerful context for the practising of skills, and they can easily be adaptable, so we hope you enjoy this game and have fun playing Mathematics! Over to you, all of the mathematicians, big and small.