I’m covered in spots and people keep throwing me around. I come in all shapes, colours, sizes and materials and I’m often seen down the casino.
Sometimes I’m loaded. I am a hardware random number generator. What am I? A die. Numerical dice are bursting with maths opportunities and a common cubical 1-6 die can be used to play a variety of activities and games. Try these out: Players can take it in turns to throw a die and each time add their score to their previous total. The first to 100 wins.
Can you make a tower of four dice and make all four sides of the tower total the same?
Throw two dice and make a vulgar fraction with the numbers thrown. Draw an empty number line from 0 to 1 and mark the place where the fraction should go.
Throw two dice and multiply together. See how many times you need to throw to get a prime number, a square number, and a number with 9 factors. One of the best ways of using dice is getting children to invent their own games.
Dice are perfect resources to practise maths at school and home
John Dabell is a numeracy consultant and teacher trainer
