Board Games: Developing Children’s Quantitative Reasoning Skill

 

Quantitative reasoning skills are skills which can be applied to the real world. They are practical abilities needed for real life ventures.

Through board games children tend to develop these quantitative reasoning skills.

 

Board game activities can be easily used in classroom settings because they’re ideal for math centers or small-group activities. Based on this idea, teacher assistants are trained from inception of duties to play the linear number game with small groups of children.

Playing the number board game in a small group supervised by a teacher from the classroom, improved children’s numerical and quantitative knowledge.

Research revealed that board games could be a way for teachers to scaffold and assist children’s learning about numbers.

 

Types of Board Games

• Chess: A classic two-player game where each player controls an army of pieces with different movement abilities, aiming to checkmate the opponent’s king.
• Monopoly: A popular economic strategy game where players buy, trade, and develop properties to accumulate wealth and bankrupt their opponents.
• Scrabble: A word game where players use letter tiles to create words on a game board, earning points based on the letters’ values and placement.
• Settlers of Catan: A strategy game where players collect resources to build settlements, roads, and cities, aiming to earn victory points and become the dominant civilization.
• Ticket to Ride: A railroad-themed game where players collect train cards to claim railway routes and complete destination tickets for points.
• Risk: A global conquest game where players use armies to conquer territories, aiming to dominate the world map.
• Clue (or Cluedo): A deduction game where players solve a murder mystery by collecting clues to determine the murderer, weapon, and location.
• Pandemic: A cooperative game where players work together as a team of specialists to stop the outbreak of diseases and find cures before it’s too late.
• Carcassonne: A tile-placement game where players build a medieval landscape with cities, roads, and fields, scoring points based on completed features.
• Battleship: A two-player game where each player hides their fleet of ships on a grid and takes turns guessing the locations to sink the opponent’s ships.

Board Game of Chess

 

Chess is a game that enhances numeric thinking in several ways. It involves strategic planning, analyzing potential moves, and calculating variations, all of which require strong numerical skills. Players must evaluate the value of each piece, understand numerical concepts like coordinates, and make precise calculations to anticipate the opponent’s moves.

By playing chess, children can improve their ability to think critically and strategically, which in turn strengthens their numerical reasoning and problem-solving skills. The game encourages children to think several moves ahead, thereby improving their capacity to manage multiple variables and make informed decisions based on numeric evaluations.

 

Benefits of Board games to Children

Board games helps children at the primary school level understand quantitative reasoning to a very large extent. This is because a mathematical operations are involved at every step.

In the learning of quantitative reasoning, children are expected to make right decisions based on problem encountered. Board game teaches them this skills.

Here are benefits of playing board games;

 

1. Board games allow kids to form abstract thoughts and think critically and strategically about even the simplest of tasks.
2. Playing board games which involves numbers help children between the ages of 3 to 8years, recognize greater and less numbers. They have the ability to compare numerals.
3. A good board game always involves some thinking process. This not only helps them to create new strategies for a winning situation but also the outcomes for each move. Moreover, this style of thinking also promotes out-of-box thinking behavior.
4. Engaging in board games aids in the practice of important cognitive skills, such as decision making, higher level strategic thinking, and problem solving.
5. Board games help children understand how others think. By anticipating other players’ actions and learning to recognise their poker faces, children become more aware of other people and how they’re playing, making decisions about their own gameplay in the context of what everyone else is doing.
6. Games improve children’s neurological development.

Others Are:

• Teaches children to take turns
• Helps them to pay attention to details.
• Improves their collaborative skills.
• Teaches them perseverance
• Promotes their Social and networking skills.
• Educates them on competition without violence.