Almost all the children in my classes play Clash of Clans, so I thought it would a good basis to try my first 3-Act lesson, as per Dan Meyer.
There’s some arithmetic and geometric progression that’s ripe for more advanced students, but I teach KS2 and KS3 so wanted something a little simpler. This thread on Reddit gave the starter
Anyway, looking forward to trying it with my Year 7s tomorrow.
Slides here: Clan Maths – Build Walls
Info Sheet here: Clash of Clans – Wall build – info sheet
Rough notes below
Act 1: The set-up
Introduce Clash of Clans / make sure everyone understands it
Show pictures of time-lapse growth and ask for questions
Discuss everyone’s questions – which interesting, which mathematical etc
Make list of these so can come back to them and try to answer
Ask for estimates of real cost of walls in gems.
Act 2: The Wrestle
Ask what sort of information we’d need to work out the answer
Discuss approach:
keep it precise
help with proportion / rate problems if need be but try to ensure students do heavy lifting
Handout info sheets
ask children to team up to find useful bits of information
can use calculators
Act 3: The Reveal
Show the answer
Explain steps and discuss how tie in to discussions in Act 2
Look at left-over questions – room for answers, what next
OK – so the questions my class came up with were:
How many times can your base change?
Why do people pay £30,000 a month to stay on top of the leaderboards?
What’s the area of the whole base?
How many trophies do you have?
What is the maximum elixir a person can store?
How much gold can you mine in a minute?
What is the area of the first and third base?
What is the grand total of gold, dark elixir and pink stuff?
What is the amount in gold of all the walls upgraded to Level 11?
We looked at the last question and the estimates were:
Estimates Gold
5 million
15 million
5 million
5 million
2 billion
7 million
8 million
4.5million
8,000,199,999
950 million
350 million
We worked out it was about 2 billion in gold or £3,100 in gem packs to get this far. We worked out it would take just short of 12 years if you ignored the gems.
“Puts you in a different context so it really helps”
“Mostly when you see this you think ‘oh this is going to be a fun lesson and we’re not going to learn much’ but actually this helps more and you find out more”
“Some people find it hard just to focus on maths so if you mix in different things like this it helps”