ScattegOrderOfOperations (A variation of Scattegories)

On New Years Eve I was introduced to Scattegories, a fabulous game wherein unique thinking is the surest way to win points for your team. Given a random letter, your team must come up with variants of a category starting with that letter.

After the holiday we were inquiring into order of operations — in particular creating expressions for counting a given set of dots using order of ops. On a whim, we decided to play a dot talk version of Scattegories. Each group was provided with the same dot talk image and tasked with writing an expression to count the number of dots. If more than one group had the same expression, both (or all) teams gained no points. What I loved about this game was that students were encouraged to use their knowledge of order of operations in unique and interesting ways. The results were incredible.