Equipment
Miniature hundreds board (PDF, 22KB)
This game is suitable as a whole class starter.
To play
In this game, one student chooses a number from 1 to 100 and writes it down where the rest of the class cannot see. The class then have to guess what the number is. They can ask questions like “is it 32?”, “is it in the fifties?”, “is it an even number?” or “is it a multiple of 3?”. The person running the game then must answer “yes” or “no” to these questions, and keeps a tally of the number of questions that have been asked. Students can have access to a miniature hundreds board (PDF, 22KB) to keep track of the numbers that have been excluded though the questions, but this is not compulsory. The purpose of the game (for the class) is to guess the answer in the least number of questions possible.
Running the game as a competition
No clues should be given about the development of “smart questions”. This is something that the students should discover for themselves. Record the score (of each person who chooses a number) on a sheet on the wall. The person who is leading the competition is the person who manages to get the MOST questions asked before their number is guessed.
Variations
Use numbers between 1000 and 10000.
Allow fractions and decimals to be chosen.