When you play battleships you are learning more than just how to blow up your partner’s ships. It is a great way to learn about cartesian co-ordinates and mapping. Here is a selection of videos about the cartesian plane or cartesian co-ordinate mapping system from Online-math-learning. This simple maze game from Shodor Interactives requires the player to use cartesian co-ordinates to map a route to the target, avoiding the mines. The Graph Mole has two versions of the game with an animated introduction to cartesian co-ordinates. You could also use a grid on the interactive whiteboard in Elluminate or GroupBoard to set up your own battleships game with a partner. This game at “Free Online games” would be a whole lot better if it used mapping co-ordinates instead of just ‘point and click’ to the target square. IXL maths has some activities, including “points on the cartesian plane” and “co-ordinate graphs as maps“.
This one, “Co-ordinate Battleships”, created by Colin from Flying Colours Maths in UK, is especially good because it has both positive and negative co-ordinates. Play against the computer by typing the co-ordinates into the box. if anyone finds a way to play with a partner using an online whiteboard or grid co-ordinates, please let me know by leaving a comment in the chat.