Looney Labs Educators Mailing list Archive

RE: [Edu] Math and Science Fluxx Ideas

  • FromScott Sulzer <ssulzer@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • DateTue, 18 Sep 2007 14:10:58 -0700
Heh, I put the idea to the list, so it's everybody's baby now.

The ideas are intended to be quite simplified; I remember when I was first
introduced to geometrical shapes in Junior High School many of them were
described in this way.  If you look at them from the bottom, you can see one
shape, i.e. circle for the cone or cylinder, and if you look at them from
the front, you can see another, triangle and square respectively.  Another
reason for the simplification (and why there aren't more items there) is to
prevent requiring 3+ keepers for a single goal.  One of the points is to
limit most, if not all, of the goals to no more than 2 keepers, as well as
re-using the keepers instead of having keepers that are only good for one
goal which is why there aren't more shapes atm.

Actually, Square could be changed to quadrilateral.  This will include the
square, rectangle, rhombus, trapezoid, kite, and parallelogram.  However,
just to cover all the angles, we would have to change circle to ellipse, a
circle just being a subset thereof, and cube would have to become
hexahedron, and sphere would switch to ellipsoid.

While this might be fine for some students, others could become confused
with the terminology, which are usually the students which need the extra
reinforcement playing Fluxx would (hopefully) provide.

To Fred:

One of the things I didn't like about your cylinder description is that
students may see the parallel lines as meaning that it were only connected
at those lines instead of a continuous face, or a solid object that the
square (rectangle, quadrilateral, etc) would indicate.

As to game issues themselves, the more keepers required for a single goal,
the easier it is for players to be unable to get a needed keeper.  The more
multiple copies of a keeper there are, the more likely it is for multiple
players to win at the same time (which is why I went with the []^3 instead
of two of each shape), ergo the limitations of two keepers per goal, one
copy of each keeper (for the most part anyway, there are always the
occasional exceptions).

While I can understand the desire to make it more "accurate" (just how many
ways are there to describe a cylinder, cone, sphere, etc), each geometric
shape could end up having a subset of keepers and goals specific to it, with
some of them only single use keepers and goals with quite a few (4+)
specific keepers required (instead of any keeper like the 5 keepers goal).

Scott Sulzer