What the hex?! The average game of Monopoly or Settlers of Catan can easily last upwards of two full hours or more — and millions of gamers of all ages find themselves hooked on these titles and the tabletop action that they invite with each new round of iterative play. Sadly, eliciting this same long-form attention to detail in the classroom can often feel like a losing battle — and teachers often struggle to find new and creative ways to keep their students’ focus no matter what sorts of fancy tricks we try to roll out on any given day of instruction.
So what if we turned our entire lesson plan into a living, breathing board game?
To create this massive new line of interactive board game inspired lesson plans, the EMC² Learning team dove deep into our equally impressive collection of real-life board games to see if we could get a closer feel for just how and why, exactly, so many of our tabletop favorites seem to captivate ENDLESS HOURS of their players’ imaginations with little more than a printed map and a few well-placed wildcards. The result? Hexagon Hunters — a radically student-centered pedagogy that blends skill with strategy and stamina to challenge learners of any age to maintain all sorts of focus and higher order thinking skills to make their way through whatever lesson plan obstacles you might ever think to throw their way.
Hexagon Hunters has been built from the ground up for maximum portability, replay value, and fun factor in any classroom. Low prep for teachers means more time to spend learning (and laughing!) with your students. And with a few quick clicks, teachers can transform ANY lesson plan into a massive board game experience that their classes will love! Simply…
PRINT – each resource comes complete with a printable game board, wildcards, and dice
PROJECT – the activity slideshow doubles as your in-class instruction manual, and
PLAY – once you’ve learned the rules on how to play, Hexagon Hunters really does run itself!
In Hexagon Hunters, all teachers need to do is select a single “TO DO ITEM” for students to complete time and again throughout the duration of the activity. Whether your classes are writing the answers to X different math equations from a massive set of problems in your textbook, generating X different higher order thinking questions related to the current unit of study in your English classroom, building X physical models of something they’ve learned about in your history classroom, or practicing composing X original sentences using past tense verbs in your world language classroom — the possibilities really are wide open. And the downloadable assets included in each resource will take care of the rest.
In fact, if you’d like to elevate the complexity of your gameplay for the “hex” of it (sorry, we couldn’t resist) — you can even include MULTIPLE “to do items” with varying degrees of difficulty for student groups to choose from as they play.
CUSTOMIZE YOUR ACTIVITY THEME:
Select a theme that’s right for your classroom and let the fully editable slideshow do the heavy lifting for you! To save you prep time, we’ve included an embedded countdown timer, a handy set of rule refreshers, and an overhead scoreboard to help you keep the activity on track for all students throughout the gameplay. Simply plug the prompt (or prompts!) that you’d like students to focus on into the box provided, and your students will be hunting for hexagons in no time!
PRINTED GAME BOARD:
For your convenience, each game of Hexagon Hunters comes with two different sized game boards. The standard game board can be printed on an average 8.5 x 11″ sheet of paper. And for teachers who’d prefer to use an even larger than life game board, we’ve included an oversized printout so you can immediately upsize all the action to create an even more immersive experience for your learners with 8 printed sheets of fun!
PRINTABLE WILDCARDS:
These cards will see a lot of action throughout the course of the game! So we recommend printing out a class set and keeping the newly created deck in your pocket as you bounce between teams. Wildcards add all sorts of unexpected fun, strategy and excitement to the activity gameplay — and the variation that they afford each game is a surefire way to inspire students to want to play again and again.
With Hexagon Hunters, teachers can quickly transform *any* lesson plan into a showdown of student-centered strategies and problem solving. This handy hexagonal approach to small group learning uses an interactive board game approach to put students squarely in the driver’s seat. Simply print, project, and play!
The activities featured in this blog post are just a handful of the 700+ resources available in the EMC² Learning library. This entire library is available to Engagement Engineers and members of the Creative Corps, and is included with your annual site membership. We hope you’ll consider joining us as an Engagement Engineer to unlock a full year of site access. For complete details including our exclusive limited time offer for annual site membership, click here.
