I whipped up this game earlier this year to give my students the opportunity to practice calculating area and perimeter of rectangles. I wanted a game that included a genuine use for finding out both area and perimeter and could’t find anything.

The main skills I aimed to have students build through this game were:

• finding efficient ways to work out the area and perimeter of rectangles beyond counting on unit at a time
• practice of notation of area and perimeter, with a focus on units of cm and cm2
• fact fluency with multiplication and addition
• strategically thinking with placement and rotation of rectangles to allow them to get the most area ‘points’ before the end of the game is triggered.

Before playing the game, I had not introduced length x width as a formula for working out the area. Most students discovered this information while playing the game, and we formalised that knowledge at the end of the lesson through discussion and some practice together.

If you choose to use this with your students, I’d love to know how it goes!

Click to download a PDF of the rules or read below.