Wanting a fab educational game that’s fun and involves improving mathematics skills? Then Maths Treasure Hunt is definitely one to consider 🙂 You only need paper, pencil and scissors (or paper, printer and scissors :-)) as some preparation is involved, but it’s worth it and it is possible to have several teams hunting at the same time.
The set-up is to create a set of cards or pieces of paper, each with a letter on them so that spells out a word. E.g. “summer” would be 6 cards each with one letter. You can use shorter or longer words or even phrases.
On each card as well as a letter there is a mathematical sum or question, eg 3×3. The next card in sequence has both the answer to the previous card’s mathematical sum eg = 9, as well as, another mathematical question. The next card will likewise have the answer to the previous card and a new question. Although not strictly necessary it helps to have ‘start’ printed on the first card and ‘end’ on the last card in the sequence. eg
Something to avoid is creating mathematical questions that have the same answer as this creates the potential for confusion, with players finding there are two or more possible cards that are the answer and therefore what the sequence of letters should eventually be.
Hide the cards around the house, garden, field, classroom, playground, etc, wherever it is safe to play and explore, to make it into a treasure hunt for the individual cards, or just scatter the cards over a tabletop.
There’s no reason not to have several sets, each with its own word to spell out, and you can change the complexity of the mathematical questions according to age/educational level.
For older children, teenagers and adults etc, it may be more fun to spell out the location of a nice prize, rather than words.
If there are other variants of this you know about, let us know in the comments below.
