Guess my Birthdate @APSWRS

The  goal of the activity is to guess my birthdate – a number between 1 to 31.  For conducting the activity we have a student as a Robot answering the questions in a “yes” or a “no” and a guessing team of students. This activity was conducted by standard 9 students from APSWRS(B),M.R.Ccolony,Pedavagi, a boys Social Welfare school from Godavari District.

Guess my birthdate an activity which is enjoyed by students across all classes. I explained the rules of the activity and then I conducted the activity by dividing the 9th standard students into 5 students in the “guessing team” with one Robot answering the questions. The idea is that the guessing team asks the questions until they get the right answer. All the teams conducted the activity and wrote down all the questions.

 

I had announced chocolates as prizes for the team of 5 students who come up with the least number of questions – this team is the winner! I had also announced a prize for the Robot who has to answer the maximum number of questions! This created a lot of excitement amongst the students to conduct the activity.

Splitting the class into smaller groups helped the students to come up with multiple solutions. After all the teams finished the activities I helped them analyse the questions and how they helped in eliminating the numbers. What is a “good” question was also discussed based on the numbers it eliminates. We compared the solutions of the different groups and I also explained to them how some solutions were better that the others. The students then identified the group with the least number of questions as the winner!

After this discussion the students came together and prepared this chart on this activity. A learning for the students through this exercise was that there are multiple solutions to solving this problem and some solutions are better than the others. Students understood the process of how a systematic approach helps to eliminate more numbers with each question. Through this chart they have shared one of the systematic ways of “Guessing my birthdate”

 

 

1 Comment

  1. Debajyoti Ghosh

    This technique is called Binary search which divides the number in two half each time, and the process takes log n or log 31 steps to find the Guess my Birthdate – here log is w.r.t base 2

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