On Thursday and Friday of this week, Dr. Jody Marberry, Middle School Math Teacher, used the game SET to encourage her students to think in four dimensions. “I had my eighth-grade accelerated math class play the game as it is intended, finding sets of three cards (one-dimensional)” Dr. Marberry says. She then challenged them to play in two dimensions, creating a 3×3 grid of sets vertically, horizontally, and diagonally, flat against the table.
SET describes itself this way: The award-winning game challenges players to find as many SETs where each individual feature (color, shape, number and shading) is either all the same OR all different! Because it has a rule of logic, and because players must apply this rule to the spatial array of patterns all at once, they must use both left brain and right brain thought processes!
Once students had successfully completed the first two challenges, Dr. Marberry introduced the three-tiered game board. The students had to extend the sets past length and width and consider depth as well. “As our world is a three-dimensional world, it is very difficult for humans to visualize a fourth dimension, but since SET uses four attributes (color, shape, shading, and number), we can add two more 3-D game boards,” Dr. Marberry explains. This is an activity Dr. Marberry learned over the summer when she attended the “Math in the Mountains Workshop,” thanks to the generosity of the Loeb Fund.
This type of exercise is important for developing math skills. “We do many non-routine problems in math class to build problem-solving skills and strategies,” says Dr. Marberry. “My students had a blast playing in the multiverse and (excuse the pun) thinking outside the box.”