Last Updated on October 2, 2024 by Editorial Team
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Have you ever tried to suggest games as a tool for learning geometry to high school students? The idea sounds very interesting and is worth a try.
First, let’s understand how geometry games and math skills correlate.
You must have known by now through our various posts that math skills are not restricted to calculating numbers or solving equations only. Computation is just one part of the subject. The other part is the reasoning.
Understanding the concepts of big-small, far-near, fast-slow, curved-straight, etc. represents the reasoning portion that is largely dependent on the knowledge of shapes. Geometry is nothing but the study of the shapes that we see around us if put in simple words.
When children develop number sense and are thorough with arithmetic calculations learning, they are introduced to Geometry at the middle and high school levels. Apart from books, technology use in education has led to the development of offline and online Geometry games that middle and high school students can use for learning purposes.
Role of Geometry games in building math reasoning
The Geometry games for high schools help enhance math reasoning in the following manners:
- The games promote structural and functional thinking
- Offer a premise for thinking of alternative strategies
- Develop shape intelligence
- Help understand the relevance of the subject in daily life situations
- Develop student’s confidence in solving geometry problems with practice and collaborative learning
All these advantages of learning must have set you in search of geometry games. So, here is some good news!
The geometry games are available both offline and online. Generally, the offline geometry board game options include card games and board games designed to challenge your mind and ultimately, develop geometrical proficiency. Apart from having these features, the online games allow you to carry your repertoire of geometry exercises wherever you go.
Listed here are the best offline and online geometry games that can help master high school-level theorems and calculations.
6 Geometry-based games for high school students
1. Euclidea
Geometry skills are the outcome of an inquisitive approach, exploratory skills, and assessment ability of possibilities. Euclidea offers an innovative platform that helps master all these virtues in a gamification way. You might be feeling short of exercises to do when you go through books; this game provides an enriched alternative to let your imagination flow and to apply it in solving hundreds of problems available in this game.
Users get to challenge their minds and employ their thinking in learning the properties of figures and their relationship with other elements available in the same spatial coordinates as theirs.
The game helps you build confidence by offering easy problems to solve at the start and then takes you on a progressive learning path, allowing you to move up the difficulty or complexity level of the problems. This means, your journey of starting with rectangles, circles, and triangles propels further and takes you to master the more complex figures like a sphere, cuboids, and so on.
All basic concepts like area, perimeter, volume, surface area, etc. become easy to learn and apply in solving the problems provided in this game when you choose to practice more and as often as possible. Repeated attempts reinforce learning offered by this geometry online game for a high schooler.
Game Link: Playstore | App Store
2. XSection
If polyhedron has been skipping your problem-solving abilities for quite some time, it is time to get a grip on this complex but interesting geometrical shape! XSection is designed to help you stimulate your mind into learning the basics and practical aspects of this shape.
You will find in this game a complete learning tool that can help you reinforce the learning of glossary terms provided as a resource. Further, the students can find the step-wise procedures to solve the problems. Moving further, the game offers you an engaging interface to explore 3D figures and their spatial relationships.
Conclusively, this online game for geometry learning proves to be a wholesome resource for mastering topics like:
- polyhedrons
- cross and diagonal sections
- traces and inner projections
- prisms, cubes, trapezoids, and many more.
This game also has integrated the features of other online learning tools like Pythagorean and Euclidea to give the users an easy, engaging way of becoming a geometry expert.
Game Link: Playstore
3. Pythagorea 60o
The triangular grid becomes your playground and your mind becomes the tool! This online game gives you a closer and clearer peek into the Pythagorean theorems that can prepare you to be a helping hand in various structural innovations. Your love for geometry concepts revolving around Pythagoras’ theorem finds the best vent out in this online game.
As a Geometry enthusiast, you can use this online game to check your proficiency in topics, like:
- angles and triangles
- perpendicular triangles
- parallelogram, trapezoids, and their relationship with triangles
- symmetry and asymmetry
- circles and tangents, etc.
The beauty of this game is that it prepares you first for the games through resources like a glossary, definitions, tips, and methods. And then, allows you to test the acquired knowledge for interesting challenges that can bridge the gap between theoretical and practical learning.
Game Link: Playstore
4. Three Sticks
In Geometry, even a single line matters as it is the primary unit of polygonal shapes. Work up your brain to get the structure that contains as many edges as possible and earn more points with each new round and every different strategy.
The game requires players to come up with ideas to place lines in order to make multi-edge figures on the board. By the simple act of placing lines strategically, the users can understand how geometrical figures make the integral units of various objects, even like a rocket.
So, the game offers shape intelligence, a better understanding of the spatial arrangement of figures, and ways to implement basic shapes like lines, triangles, squares, angles, etc. to concatenate them into objects you can find in real surroundings.
5. Wooden Pentominoes Tangram Puzzle Game
Kids are introduced to dominoes as shape manipulatives at an early age. This simple structure of dominoes moves up to the little complex figure, pentominoes, in this geometry game for high school students. When you need a break from screen time and require something engaging to pass the time, this geometry game comes to your rescue and offers you a fun-filled pretext to apply geometry basics and complete the puzzle.
This puzzle is as addictive, but in a constructive manner, as are various online games, but stands out in the geometry learning support it provides to the players.
So, tease the brain, improve your logic, and come closer to attaining perfection in geometrical shape intelligence. This game allows you to do all of this and helps you enhance spatial awareness and geometric dexterity.
6. Zangle Card Game
Find your angle to make a Zangle – this tagline of this game tells about the purpose of this game quite aptly and affirms its role in geometry learning. Players flip or spin cards and strategize to create geometric figures series. The users can pick any geometric pattern as the final figure and reach it by using the cards in some sequence to get the outcome and score points.
Zangle introduces the players to the application aspect of angles and makes it easy for them to understand how the spatial arrangement of angles can result in some mind-blowing shapes. The high schoolers enjoy this mind-bending game to take a break from geometry books and continue their learning endeavor by adding some fun to the study hour.
Best strategies to employ geometry games as high schoolers’ learning resource
High school students can find practicality-focused support in games to meet their objectives of attaining proficiency in geometry. However, these can serve the purpose the best when you know about the strategies to use them effectively.
a. Strategy of simulation: Simulation strategy involves encouraging players to look for real-life examples and sites of applications to emphasize the practicality of learning.
b. Strategy of investigation: The investigation strategy is employed mostly to utilize the wait time that is a common part of any board game. Players can put their investigating activity to the fore when the other players are planning to make the next move. The investigation may include inquiring about the principle applicable or reflecting on the other strategies to solve the problem.
c. Instruction following: The adherence to instructions corresponds mostly to the initial learning phase. This is done mainly to strengthen the basics. When the mind has become strong enough to find a way around the instructions, the players can go into hit-and-trial or experimenting mode.
d. Experimentation: The experimentation strategy enables the learners to look for alternatives for reaching a solution. Online games offer tremendous scope for experimentation as the users continue to do hits and trials to reach on various possible outcomes. Similarly, in board games, experimentation is used to go creative with the ways to use the materials provided in the game and build geometry concepts in the process.
Final Thoughts
Geometry is a very interesting subject, but it does require self-interest and perseverance to attain proficiency in it. As high school students have a lot going on in their minds, they get distracted and disinterested in conventional methods of learning. But as a teacher, it is your job to spark interest and keep it alive in the minds of your students. One of the best ways to achieve this within the confines of your high school classroom is online and offline geometry games.
Games and activities take the boredom out of learning and also replace the anxiety with constructive pondering over the strategies to achieve comfort with this concept. So if you too are thinking of bringing variety to your teaching methods, do give the games mentioned in this write-up a try. We are sure your geometry class will be filled with enthusiasm and a new energy that will bring your students close to geometry and its myriad concepts.
An engineer, Maths expert, Online Tutor and animal rights activist. In more than 5+ years of my online teaching experience, I closely worked with many students struggling with dyscalculia and dyslexia. With the years passing, I learned that not much effort being put into the awareness of this learning disorder. Students with dyscalculia often misunderstood for having just a simple math fear. This is still an underresearched and understudied subject. I am also the founder of Smartynote -‘The notepad app for dyslexia’,