Ratio Rumble

Ratio Rumble

https://mathsnacks.com/ratio-rumble.html

Ratio Rumble is a battle-style game where players choose a character and try to beat an opponent by creating potions made from bottles of colored liquid. Students must select the appropriate number of bottles in the right colors in the right order to make the correct potion which will inflict damage on the opponent.

Standards: CA & NY 6.RP.1

Mathematical Practices: 6 – attend to precision and 7 – look for and make use of structure

The first few levels could be appropriate for students as young as 3rd grade, but after level 10 it would really only be appropriate for 5th grade and older because it requires some knowledge of proportion, equivalence, and fractions.

Challenges:

·         Maintaining the equivalence of the ratios.

·         Use the “countdown bottles” before they explode and cause damage to your character.

·         In the mid-range levels, the ratios might have three numbers.

·         At the higher levels, the ratios include decimals in increments of 0.5. This encourages students to view decimals as representations of ratios or fractions.

Strategies:

·         Carefully choose bottles to gain health and cause damage to your opponent.

·         Use the reshuffle option to rearrange the board and improve your options.

·         Use more of the potions to get more health, create a stronger attack against your opponent, or eliminate countdown bottles by using larger numbers in the same ratio (i.e., instead of 1:1, use 5:5).

Teacher guide: https://mathsnacks.com/media/print/ratiorumble_teachingwith.pdf

More teaching suggestions:

·         Give the students a chance to play and let them develop their own hypotheses about the object of the game and what skills it requires.

·         Put the game up on the screen in front of the class and have students demonstrate their solutions.

·         Have students organize different solutions to the same problem in a table.

·         Use the ratios from the game in other contexts (ex. build them with Cuisenaire rods or Unifix cubes).

 

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