Block Talk

In Block Talk, teams of players collaborate to build structures out of colored cube-shaped blocks using the cards as their reference. One player is the director, and the other is the builder. The catch: only the director can see the card, but only the builder can see the blocks. Also, only the director can speak freely; the builder can only ask to repeat the last instruction, nothing else. The goal is to get through as many cards as possible in 2 minutes. In order to succeed, players must be skilled at giving and receiving very clear and specific directions.

This game was made in collaboration with math educators at Quest to Learn to be a lead-in activity for learning the order of operations. The idea is to underscore the importance of clear communication between mathematicians. The game has since found use in other domains such as language and computational thinking.

As with all classroom games, the game is meant to be simple and easily executable, with few rules and materials. However, it also needed to be deep enough to hold student interest and teach them something about communication. During the design process, student playtesting helped to identify successes and challenges in implementation.