Dice Article

USING DICE

I guess we are all very familiar with using dice in all kind of environments. Many of us have our favourite games that use dice and see their pupils enjoying the game experience while reinforcing some of their basic numeracy skills.
Using dice with younger children or pupils who need to have their confidence boosted in the world of mathematics requires us to use the usual dice with dots on. So with a small group of pupils who each have a dice to use, (often working on a soft surface to reduce the noise distraction) when each of them have rolled their dice we can have some good worthwhile conversations about what they see.
“What can you see?”
“Have we all got the same?”
“Tell me about yours.”
It would be good if the adult also had a dice in front of them so that they could be more effectively joining in. The pace of what goes on is obviously governed by each contribution that comes along. It’s probably best if there is not a strict agenda in the adult’s mind at the start of the session. There are lots of prompts that can be appropriate throughout the short session.
“Who has the most dots?”
“Do you think anyone has the same number of dots as me?”
“You have two dots on yours, can we all turn our dice over and around so we all have just two dots?”
“WOW! Can we do that again?”
So, more and more useful dialogue can go on in which the pupils may feel more confident to contribute their own thoughts, aspects that are foundational to number recognition and addition may well occur.
However one way of extending the use of dice to help pupils develop their thinking further is to bring in some of the less usual dice – those with a different range of numbers on them. Just showing some 0 to 9 dice in place of the usual $1$ to $6$ dice can give the opportunity for the teacher to ask some good open questions.
“Suppose we swop one of these ($1-6$) with this ($0-9$), will that make any difference to the game?”
Then we can go further depending on the response that the pupil gives after being given time to think about it. It may lead to some discussion among the pupils as to whether the game will go quicker, slower or much the same. Its always good to add in the option of “the same” when talking with pupils about something being more or being less.
Other dice that can act as a catalyst to this kind of thinking is the dice that goes $1,2,3,1,2,3,$ in place of $1-6$. Try it out, you may be surprised. Remember also that there are dice with varying numbers of faces giving rise to some quite large numbers. I once had a dice the size of a billiard ball that had $100$ faces!
Another way of getting into the larger numbers is by having two $0 – 9$ dice of different colours so that one will determine the tens numeral and the other the units.
We have a number of activities here that rely upon the use of dice. We try very hard to have activities that have a Low Threshold and a High Ceiling, so that pupils of lower ability can get into the activity and get somewhere, whereas the most able can easily be extended through the activity. You can read more about this here.