Work in pairs or in teams of about 3. You need one set of 6 playground cones and 6 bean bags per pair or plastic cups if you are doing this in a classroom. One team has a sheet on which are drawn different arrangements of cups.
First round, let one of the pair/teams give instructions to the other so that they can reproduce a particular arrangement of cups.
Second round, the team with the cups needs to question the team who can see the arrangement and they should provide no information other than in response to a question.
Third round, you can make this harder by restricting the answers to ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
Another variation is to restrict the number of questions they can ask – this is good for differentiating for more able children.
We have also used cards with 1 (for yes) or 0 (for no) that can be used to answer the questions.
To play the game, you will need two separate sheets with different arrangements on each so that each team has a different sheet. Alternatively, put each arrangement on a single sheet and hand them out individually as one pair finishes.
