XACTIKA Skill Connections

XACTIKA is an original card game, with three ways to play. Students can PLAY TO WIN: take the most tricks, high score wins. Or they can PLAY TO LOSE: take the fewest tricks, low score wins. Or PLAY TO BID, where the student must win exactly the number of tricks he/she bid (hence the name XACTIKA).

The three ways to play all teach critical thinking, math skills, and social and personal skills; however each way to play emphasizes different skills:

• When students PLAY TO WIN, they must understand how to play each card so it has the highest probability of winning.
• When they PLAY TO LOSE, students must understand the inverse of the rule and play each card so it has the highest probability of losing.
• When students PLAY TO BID, XACTIKA challenges and builds their ability to estimate the outcome of a series of processes. Each student must evaluate the probability of being in a position to take other players’ cards that are laid down each round, based on the cards in his or her hand. The game is designed such that cards that appear to be likely to take a trick initially may become less likely to take a trick as cards are played and those cards that do not initially appear likely to take a trick, may now be viable to do so. Developing the ability to correctly bid their hands involves analytical reasoning and following the evolution of the play develops patterning skills. Students must recognize the value of their hand, not just from having the highest point cards in one of the four suits on each card, but also from an understanding of the chances that opponents may or may not have cards of similar value.

Rules for Playing SET with Teams in the Classroom

Note: The following exercises call for the use of SET transparencies or an interactive whiteboard.

Divide the class into teams of 3-8 students each. Go to www.setgame.com and view the SET Daily Puzzle. Duplicate the puzzle on the overhead or project it onto the interactive whiteboard.

This lesson includes 3 different ways to play with teams in the classroom:
Quiet Team Play
Quiet Team Play to Develop English Language Skills
Team Play to Develop Communication Skills

Language Skills Using SET in the Classroom

For this exercise, transparencies can be placed on the overhead projector or printed on a worksheet for students to work individually or in teams.

Activity: Place two cards on the overhead projector. Ask the students to describe the missing card. For younger students, have them fill in missing adjectives in a sentence you provide.

More Advanced Activity: Place two cards on the overhead projector. Ask the students to draw the missing card and then write a sentence describing it.
Example: I need two open purple ovals to complete this SET.
Place two new cards on the overhead projector. Ask the students to draw the missing card and then write a sentence using a different verb or sentence structure. Example: In order to complete this SET, a solid red oval is required.
Continue as above: The third sentence could be: “Please give me an open red diamond.”

Developing Mathematical Reasoning using Attribute Games

By Anne Larson Quinn, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Edinboro University, Quinna@edinboro.edu
Frederick Weening, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Edinboro University, Fweening@edinboro.edu
Robert M. Koca, Jr., Ph.D.

Reproduced with permission from the Mathematics Teacher, copyright 1999 by the NCTM.

The game of SET^® has proven to be a very popular game at our college mathematics club meetings. Since we've started playing, the membership has grown every month. In fact, one of our members brought her six year old son to a meeting, and he now looks forward to playing SET^® with us every month. As a result of playing the game in our club and thinking about the results, we created and solved a variety of mathematical questions. For example, we wondered about possible strategies for winning and conjectured about phenomena that happened when playing. These questions involve a wide variety of traditional mathematical topics, such as the multiplication principle, combinations and permutations, divisibility, modular arithmetic, and mathematical proof.

SET Recognition as a Window to Perceptual and Cognitive Processes

MICHAL JACOB AND SHAUL HOCHSTEIN
Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

The Set visual perception game is a fertile research platform that allows investigation of perception, with gradual processing culminating in a momentary recognition stage, in a context that can be endlessly repeated with novel displays. Performance of the Set game task is a play-off between perceptual and conceptual processes. The task is to detect (among the 12 displayed cards) a 3-card set, defined as containing cards that are either all similar or all different along each of four dimensions with three possible values. We found preference and reduced response times (RTs) for perceiving set similarity (rather than span) and for including cards sharing the most abundant value in the display, suggesting that these are searched preferentially (perhaps by mutual enhancement).

MATHEMATICAL FUN & CHALLENGES IN THE GAME OF SET^®

By Phyllis Chinn, Ph.D. Professor of Mathematics
Dale Oliver, Ph.D. Professor of Mathematics
Department of Mathematics
Humboldt State University
Arcata, CA 95521

The Game of SET

SET Up

This version of the game is 1/2 luck and 1/2 skill for 2 or more players. SETs are made according to the rules of classic SET.

Object:  To play a card from your hand that does not make a SET with the cards already played on the table. 

Download Printable Instructions Here

XACTIKA Graphing Skills

You can use XACTIKA to teach students how to create bell curves and bar graphs.  Once your students have created their graphs, they can use the visual aids to learn about statistics and probabilities and to better understand how using statistics and probabilities affects their strategy when playing the game. 

End Game SET

Object
To determine the attributes of the missing card.

The Play
At the beginning of the game, remove one card from the deck and place it face down to the side. 

Now play the game according to the standard rules of SET.  When no more SETs can be found, you can determine the attributes of the missing card.

Download Printable Instructions Here