Grouping games help

[wffong09]

I'm in the weekend course that just finished up. Apparently our grouping game lecture this weekend did not sink in. I did a frighteningly poor job on the homework in the book (pg 296-299).

Game 1 was the worst. I completely misunderstood the whole game. For instance, I did not understand that a pilot could not fly more than one plane because it was never mentioned that all the planes were flown at the same time. In my experience, an air show consists of several acts each of which has at least one plane flying at a time, not all available pilots flying as many planes as possible at the same time. They never, in my mind, used any language which forced them all to fly at the same time, so the way I set up the game was extremely open. Also, did I understand that only one pilot could be aboard a plane as they said “aboard” and not “piloting”. Only one pilot can “pilot” a plane but a plane could have a hundred pilots “aboard” as passengers. The same goes for copilots, in my mind anyways.

That game was a total bust and, frankly, the other three weren’t great. What should I do? Are there any more games available for me to try since I already did all the ones in the book?

[Adam Tyson]

I wouldn't worry too much about that airshow game, wffong - you've pointed out a problem with it that many of my students also encountered, and in my opinion the game is poorly written because it does not make clear that a given pilot or copilot can only be aboard one plane in the show. In defense of the game's authors, I will point out that they did say that the planes are "flying in the show" rather than saying that they "can be flown in the show" or that they "are flown in the show". I think they felt that this was sufficiently clear in meaning that the planes are all in the air, and that we would all make the commonsense assumption that nobody will move from one plane to another while in mid-flight. I don't like it, but that has to be what they intended with their choice of language in the scenario.

The game does allow for more than one pilot to be aboard a plane, and for more than one copilot.

Do you have access to the online student center? Re-visit the grouping portion of the course book to see if more of the basics sink in the second time around (I know that the weekend course goes very, very fast, and not everything sticks the first time around at that pace), then try your hand at a few more games from the online materials. Go slow - don't worry about time at first, not until you get the basics down. Once you get the hang of how to diagram various rules and to make inferences, then you should be able to pick up the pace some.

Good luck!

Adam