A popular math game among educators called Around the World demands quickness and accuracy from students. To play, the teacher chooses a student to begin. The student stands next to his classmate who sits in the front row on the teacher's far right. The teacher flips over a card with a math problem on it. Both students get to answer, but the one who answers the quickest moves on to the next classmate. The student who accumulates the most correct answers wins.
Challenge students to a math baseball game. Divide them up into a home and an away team and select a manager for each team. Have the managers choose positions for their respective teams and also ask them to come up with a team name. The teacher, or now umpire, draws a baseball diamond on the board. When the umpire says, "Play ball," the first batter steps up. The pitcher for the opposing team flips over a card with a math problem on it. If the batter gets it right, he gets a base hit. This continues until a team gives three wrong answers or "outs." After three outs, the teams switch sides. The umpire chooses how many innings will be played.
Use a deck of cards as a tool for playing math games. Take out all of the face cards for elementary math, but assign values to the face cards for more advanced learners. Have a student volunteer stand in front of the class with the deck of cards. She will ask another student to choose two cards from the deck face down. Once the cards are chosen, students raise their hands and ask questions to find out the total value of the two cards, which only the student volunteer knows. They can ask only yes or no questions such as "Is it a multiple of three?" or "Is it an even number?" Once a student guesses a correct answer, repeat the process with two different cards.
If you prefer to play games alone, plenty of online math games exist. Beginners can play a game called Math Man (www.mathplayground.com), which copies the old arcade game Pac-Man. You use your arrow keys to move, eat dots and eat ghosts. Throughout the game, you will see question marks. When you pass through a question mark, you will see an equation. One of the ghosts has the answer to that equation. You select a ghost to eat, and if you eat the wrong ghost, you lose a man. The game becomes more challenging as you complete each level.