One of my favorite games to play in class is Martina Bex’s Unfair Game! In her game, students select a number from a grid and answer the question associated with that number. Students can choose to take or give away the points, but their goal is to stay as close to zero as possible. In our game today, we took some parts of the game Stinky Feet, some parts of the Unfair Game, and some new twists and played “Pasaporte perdido.” This version was from Huellas Your Way 2.8, but it appears in different forms throughout the Huellas Your Way expansion packs!

Since our unit is about travel, I made a giant passport (as you can see, art skills will vary). This is a giant post-it note! I placed 16 numbered little post its (sorry about the color change, Type A friends). Under each, I wrote a positive or negative point value.

In this game, they were aiming for a high score, not to stay closest to zero! So the negative numbers were bad for them!

To keep it entertaining, I added “double your score” and “steal a score”.

In 1st hour, the double score came when the team was at zero and in 7th hour, a team with -8 got it! They moved to negative 16!

Steal a score could NOT have been better. In first hour, one team was losing because every round they picked a negative number. They all take statistics and were wondering if the stats on that were low probability. In the last play of the game, the only post it left was covering the steal a score (but they had no idea it existed). After being in last place all game (in spite of right answers), they were able to steal the high score and win!

Next time, I will add a couple more fun surprises, I will make 20 post-its with numbers behind, and I will change the location of the good stuff before the second group plays!! Live and learn!

This game would work with any content! Studying the ocean? Draw a wave. Studying the periodic table, have them pick elements not numbers for their questions! The possibilities are endless!