Games to Play on a SMART Board

Art Games

• The Education page of smarttech.com has an extensive index of activities and games that can work for the Smart Board's classroom environment. One of these leads to Artgames at albrightknox.org. The different games are for children, with the age range being from preschoolers to 6th graders. The Artgames use paintings by master artists to introduce lessons, as well as to engage the children's visual sense. Through these activities, children will also learn to appreciate culture and the arts.

Uncross the Lines

• The website smartboards.typepad.com lists this game as one of its favorites, though it doesn't have the time limit that other popular games have. Uncross the Lines feels like cat's cradle, a children's game where the player forms different patterns through the tangling and untangling of string, except here there is only untangling. Every level features crossed lines connected by vertices, which are what the player moves to uncross the lines. The levels progress in difficulty, but the game as a whole offers a player the mental equivalent of cracking your knuckles, providing a sense of relief as the knots of lines come undone. This game can review concepts of geometry for middle school students and older, but its engagement of spatial intelligence makes its audience more diverse.

Jigsaw Sudoku

• Sudoku is a grid number puzzle that people solve on paper, but the computer interface is not the only thing that makes this Flash game different. In Sudoku, the goal is to fill in the empty boxes on the grid with any number from 1 to 9 following restrictions: each number should appear only once on each row, once on each column, and once on each region, which consists of 9 grid cells. While the Flash game, called Jigsawdoku, follows these basic principles, one difference is that instead of writing, the player guides tiles of numbers onto the target grid cell. Another difference is that Jigsawdoku lets the player bring the game to her specific level. The options for the size of the grid and level of the game are 4 by 4, 6 by 6 with easy and medium levels and 9 by 9 with easy, medium and difficult levels. Finally, this game caters to the particular intelligence the player has. There are three kinds of tiles that she can choose from. If the player has good logical-mathematical intelligence, she can stick to number tiles. If her skills are more spatial, the symbol tiles might fit her better. If she is more at home with letters, then the letter tiles are for her.