The Description:
The Jungle Hideout activity is something I got from Dan Meyer. He has several in the handouts of his geometry and algebra curriculum, and his blog post about them can be seen here.
You put up 8 to 10 hideouts around room. Each hideout has one problem on it, with multiple choice answers. Each answer directs students to a different hideout. The point of the activity is to find the Jungle Hideout. Now if they answer every question correctly, they will be sent to every hideout except one. And the one they are never sent to is the Jungle Hideout. That is what the students are looking for.
Creating these is easy. Just pick any order that you want – say for instance you choose 2 – 3 – 8 – 4 – 1 – 7 – 5. So your hideout is 6. Once you have your order, you just need 8 mulitple choice problems, and make sure that the right answers go in the correct order. After that just send the wrong answers anywhere.
A way to differentiate for the advanced students, is to have them be in charge of one of the hideouts when they finish. When they are in charge of a hideout, they have to answer all the questions of the students at the hideout. I give the students 2 pts. extra credit for taking over one of the hideouts.
The Advice:
– Never tell students the Hideout without them telling you their order. Students will come up to me and say “The hideout is 6”. And I will always respond “What’s your order?”. This allows me to make sure that they did not just guess, that they actually did the problems.
– I intentionally put more difficult problems by the whiteboards, so I can use those to help explain them.
The Goods:
I have created lots of these, they are listed below by topic (at least they will be when I get more storage space). Many of the individual problems were taken from Hideouts created by Dan Meyer.