Last Updated on October 10, 2022 by Editorial Team
Graphs are useful tools. Be it weather patterns or a student’s performance over time, a graph will help you process it much easier and faster. Moreover, graphs are fun to look at too! You can pick from a pie chart, a bar graph, a dot graph, and so many more styles to explain your quantitative data better.
We learn about graphs right from our beginnings. As we progress and move to middle school, we are introduced to graphing as a concept. Graphing is a common method of visually illustrating data and their relationships in pictorial form. It helps avoid the presentation being too numerous. A student can make tables to represent a particular set of data, but sadly, that is not possible if the number of entries is high. This is where graphing comes into play.
To help students understand this concept better, teachers and parents can introduce them to such games that will help them master graphing. In this post, we will be discussing some of the fun online graphing games that middle school can play while learning the basics of graphs and related concepts.
Games for learning graphs in middle school?
A graph is a useful visual tool for middle schoolers, which they would later use in their professional stint as well. A graph gives the readers the simplest view of broader concepts and data. It helps the students analyze information through structured formats. This way, interpreting data becomes a cakewalk for middle school students. Middle schoolers can master graphing in many ways, but a lot of teachers are now shifting their focus towards games and using them as educational tools.
Need of graphing in middle school
Graphing is a great source to understand different concepts of mathematics. This concept is taught in early middle school to help children understand mathematical relations such as less than, grouping, number equality, and much more. Graphing makes children learn the following:
- Sorting different types of data
- Organizing the sorted data in their places
- Counting the total number of entries
- Comparing the present data with data in the past
- Analyzing all the data and interpreting a scenario
How do games and activities help?
Research shows that games and activities are among the best teaching methods for young students. Playing these games, be it online or offline, helps students understand the complexities of any concept.
- Games and activities help the student think out of the box
- Graphing, in particular, works beautifully as a gaming concept. Games and activities can teach this topic in a way in which not only makes it more fun but also ensures retention
- Games are also a relaxing way to judge the understanding of the concept as children do not look at games like studying.
- Games and activities engage students in a way in which maths doesn’t. This is especially true for children who find mathematics boring and tough.
Fun online graphing games for middle school
1. The Jellybean Tree
The game involves students having an optimum understanding of graphs because looking at the bar graph; students need to drop the jellybeans at the correct places. For a better understanding of graphs, the bar graph can be replaced by a pie chart. But, the rules of the game remain the same in both cases. Every time a new game begins, a different bar appears, having a different number of jellybeans, making this game fun and interesting.
2. Fuzz Bugs Graphing
This educational game requires students to segregate the fuzz bugs according to their color. Kids need to create a bar graph after sorting and answering questions related to the colour, orientation, and much more. This game teaches the concept of graphing uniquely, as the tubes in the game look like a bar graph.
3. Favourite Colours Bar Chart
The use of a bar graph and the way how questions are asked in this game tests the ability of the student to read the information and data on the graph. The game consists of a bar graph that mentions all the students’ favourite colours in the class. Then, it asks various questions based on this data, which involves reading the graph and accurately answering the questions.
4. Bombs On The Grid
The game is about saving yourself by driving through the spots which do not have a bomb. By reading and interpreting the right coordinate, you would be able to save yourself. This interesting game clears the concepts of coordinates which are a must-know when it comes to graphing for middle schoolers.
5. Quadrant Commander
This alien ship game revolves around attacking the ships and mines based on the coordinate that they are at. These mines and ships keep moving and based on the number of the grid, the player has to shoot them. This game calls for a perfect understanding of quadrants, graphs, and coordinates, and that is what makes the students understand the concept better.
6. Treasure Hunting: Graphing on a Coordinate Plane
Children have to search for buried treasure in this game by reading and comprehending the coordinates. Players are given clues from time to time about the location of the pirates’ whereabouts. The students need to accurately graph the points using X-axis and Y-axis to reach the treasure.
Fun graphing activities for middle schoolers
Just like games, activities have also proven to be a great learning source for little learners. There are plenty of activities that ensure that such important mathematical concepts are retained forever.
- Grid Worksheets
Worksheets with mazes on coordinate grids help with a good understanding of the topic, as they have to write the coordinates in the path to reach the end of the maze. These maze worksheets involve coordinate grids, coordinates, tables of points, and quadrants, which ease the understanding curve.
- Bills & Notes
Bills of gas, electricity, and water have base rates and usage rates. Usually, by multiplying the usage rate by the number of units used and adding the product base rate, we get the total bill. Making middle school students put these bills into graphs can help them in a great way. These should be done in slope-intercept form for a much better understanding and grasping.
- Dream Trips
Making students understand a concept while relating it to real-life situations works the best. Make middle schoolers plan a trip to their dream destination using a Mercator projection map to plot the cities on the map. Both the cities would have latitude and longitude coordinates, which would help students navigate through the various points, equations, and series of lines.
Summing Up
Graphing is not just an inevitable part of math; it turns out to be unavoidable in life too. Making the concept clear and precise right from school is necessary. This is where games and activities come into play. Through these games and activities, you can be assured that your child has grasped the concepts well and will remember them all their life. It is just like putting the theoretical knowledge on to a much more practical way, which helps them comprehend better,
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’,