24 Game Tournament

I did it!  I held a 24 Game Tournament this year with my 7th and 8th graders!  It was a great experience for all and I can't wait to do it again next year.

Here is how it went down.  I have been using the 24 Game as daily warm ups and giving the kids lots of practice time in the weeks leading up to the tournament.  About a week before I started recording progress and engagement in the classes.  I used that as an elimination round to select the final competitors.  I ended up with twelve 7th graders and nine 8th graders to move on to the main event.  

Since we don't switch classes the last week of school we used my classroom and I sent out my homeroom students to other rooms and called in all of the competitors.  As they entered they were given the yellow game card.  

The cards told them the table they would go to for each round.  I had predecided the players for each group for rounds 1 and 2.  I put the 7th graders together and the 8th graders together.  After round 2 we added up the scores and I took the 9 highest scoring players and split them into 3 groups.  I had a nice mix of 7th and 8th graders in the semi-finals.  I was excited to see how the semi-finals would go because I had noticed during the class times that the 7th graders were much more into the game and excited for the tournament than the 8th graders.  However, the 8th graders stepped up!  For the finals I took the three highest scoring players from the semi-finals to play the championship round.  It ended up being one 7th grader and two 8th graders.  It was a tough match!  One 8th grader got disqualified and the other two players tied!  We had a one card tie-breaker and my 7th grader was the champion!  

I gave out the prize-large bags of Skittles, Starbursts and LifeSavers!  Last year my kids were all about Takis, this year its all about candy!

I basically used the rules from the Suntex website with some tweaking: http://www.24game.com/t-tournamentrules.aspx

The tweaks I made were I did not use the timing they suggest.  The proctors gave them one minute to find a solution.  Next I gave them the option of stating the pattern first or just jumping in with the steps of the solution.  I also gave them more like 30 seconds to get the answer out once they touched the card.  That wasn't such an issue, when they knew it, they were able to get it out.  That was pretty much it!