Comments on: Go Low Or Go Home

By: Haylee

Haylee — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 18:33:29 +0000

This looks like so much fun! We may have to try this for some fun when we get back from winter break!

By: Simon

Simon — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 13:57:35 +0000

Did this with four classes yesterday. Really interesting to see how students responded to each round.
Thanks Jim for the types of numbers idea ( I.e lowest prime).
One of the ‘classes’ was me with two students.
Was great watching them realise they could fix the game by picking 1 and 2. Took a good 6 rounds however.

Some of my keen 11 year olds wanted to stay back at lunch and keep playing! That’s an endorsement.

By: David

David — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:50:29 +0000

Hi everyone,

I did this in my class on Friday and believe it or not, the number 1 was the winner. My whole class was in disbelief and even the student who won couldn’t believe that he got away with that. He said “I just had a feeling nobody else would put 1…” :)

Thanks, it was fun.

By: Ernie

Ernie — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 15:38:31 +0000

fyi, they do this every day at tanga.com to give away some kind of prize, it’s called their bottom feeder contest (near the bottom of the homepage). when they post results they show the 20 lowest unique #’s and they also show how many people picked the ones that you picked.

By: Kaleb

Kaleb — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 05:31:13 +0000

I wonder how it would change the results if the winner got his answer in dollars.
I thought I’d do this in class, not with the money, and so I made this funny intro video. If you’re interested…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vinfm8Jz-LI&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Kaleb

By: Jim

Jim — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 19:29:16 +0000

Done it in all classes today… gave out loads of chocolate, kids love it! A great time filler! Thanks!

Started to do it with lowest square number, prime number, traingule number, etc etc – to get some more maths in there.

On a similar vain, I also like splitting the class in half. Each half takes it in turn to add a number (1 to 10) into the cummulative total. Team which lands of 100 wins.

Lots of extension work to go from there too… why do you always win, etc etc!

By: Neal

Neal — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 12:24:06 +0000

Another game idea (paraphrased below), which just got suggested on a club chat list from my college:

Pick a number between 0 and 100. All numbers will be totalled, and the average computed. The winner is the person with the number closest to 2/3 of the average.

By: Bowen Kerins

Bowen Kerins — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 04:09:46 +0000

This is also an auction style: a “low unique bid” auction…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_bid_auction

There are several websites that do these types of auctions and make their results available.

Related (?) is the raffle scheme from a Martin Gardner article. He said anyone could send him a postcard giving the number of raffle tickets they wanted; the winner is drawn randomly. The prize was $1,000,000, divided by the total number of raffle tickets. He rounded the prize up to the nearest penny and paid the winner 1c.

I tried this in my own classes with $100 divided by the total number of tickets, and I think the most I ever paid out was about 50 cents. It’s an extreme example of Prisoner’s Dilemma, where one jerk gets to ruin it for everyone…

By: James C.

James C. — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 00:26:23 +0000

Game Theory offers so much opportunity for reasoning exercises like this one.

Here’s another simple one. Have a bidding war with the students. The highest number gets the amount of dollars they bid, the second highest bid has to pay it. The trick of this exercise (some flare needed by the teacher) is to get the first bid thrown out.

And another, the classic: Everyone guess a number. Whoever guesses closest to 2/3 of the class average wins.

By: Nico

Nico — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 19:41:25 +0000

@Alex. I got 2 negative numbers when I played with over 300 students. The numbers were -50 000 and -7 999.