Jackstone is a popular, traditional game from the Philippines. The objective of the game is to pick up all the jacks in one hand while tossing the ball in the air and catching it.
By Celeste Hayden-Browne, Jasie Santos and Vyxen Vaughn Valenzuela.
Equipment:
A set of jacks (usually ten)
A small rubber ball
Rules:
Players take turns. The first player scatters the jacks on a flat surface and tosses the ball into the air.
The player must pick up one jack with the same hand that tossed the ball and catch the ball with the same hand.
The player continues picking up jacks one by one while maintaining control of the ball.
If a player fails to pick up a jack or catch the ball, they lose their turn.
Once all the jacks are picked up, the player moves on to a more challenging round, such as picking up two or more jacks at a time.
The game continues until a player successfully completes all the rounds.
Learning Through Jackstone
Hand-Eye Coordination: Jackstone requires precise hand-eye coordination. Players need to accurately pick up jacks while simultaneously keeping track of and catching the ball. This improves fine motor skills and helps develop hand-eye coordination.
Manual Dexterity: The game encourages fine motor skills and finger agility, as players must handle the jacks delicately to succeed. This can be particularly beneficial for younger children who are still developing their fine motor skills.
Concentration and Focus: Jackstone requires players to concentrate on the game, ensuring that they follow the rules and maintain control over the ball and jacks. This helps improve concentration and focus.
Patience: Success in jackstone often requires practice and patience. Players must be persistent and keep trying, even if they make mistakes. This can teach students the value of patience and perseverance.
Math Skills: Jackstone introduces basic counting and multiplication concepts. Players learn to count jacks and multiply by the number they’re attempting to pick up at once.
Social Skills: Playing Jackstone with others fosters social interaction and cooperation. Students learn to take turns, resolve conflicts, and engage in friendly competition.
Physical Activity: Jackstone is a physically active game that encourages movement. It can be a fun way to get students to be active and engage in physical play, which is essential for their overall development.
Spatial Awareness: Playing jackstone involves understanding the spatial relationships between the jacks and the ball. Players need to anticipate where the ball will land and strategise how to pick up the jacks efficiently.
Problem Solving: As the game becomes more challenging with variations, players need to develop problem-solving skills to figure out the best approach to picking up multiple jacks at once.
Competitive Spirit: Jacks can be played competitively, encouraging healthy competition and the development of good sportsmanship. Players learn to win graciously and lose gracefully.
Barriers in the Game
Jackstone is a relatively simple game that requires little equipment. However, it can be physically challenging and calls for good fine motor and hand-eye coordination. It could be difficult for certain players to participate fully if they have a physical disability or limitation.
Who might be Excluded
The physical aspect of the game may result in exclusion for those with significant motor disabilities. Additionally, until they learn how to play, individuals who are unfamiliar with the game’s rules could feel excluded.
Fostering Creativity
Players can come up with imaginative gameplay methods. For instance, they could come up with original strategies for picking up the jacks or develop different versions of the game.
Critical thinking
Players must determine the trajectory and timing necessary to catch the ball and pick up the jacks, which promotes critical thinking. When players plan to win, they are also addressing problems.
What content is handled? What skills are being activated in the game?
The game of jackstone is a systematically demanding game, that commences with simplicity and gradually escalates in complexity as you advance. It engages learners’ problem-solving abilities as it presents challenges and necessitates adherence to the rules. Also, it stimulates students’ higher-order thinking skills, it compels them to scrutinise each move and evaluate techniques to employ; since numerous approaches can be employed to complete a level or collect the jacks.
How will you assess if learning is happening?
Within this particular game, evaluating learning occurs through the adaptations made with each turn. Whenever a level proves insurmountable, players engage in introspection, identifying their errors and formulating strategies for improvement in the subsequent attempt.
Group Members: Jessica Harrell, Melanie Ortiz and Oliver Clark
We decided to play a partially electronic version of the classic game, Jumanji, as part of our Let’s Play experience. Below is an instructional video which gives details on how to play the game for better context when reviewing our reflection. We felt this would be a more beneficial way for reviewing the rules of the game as it is quite complex in nature to explain in written form.
Playing the Game:
You can see a video of our play experience below:
Reflection:
What were the barriers in the game?
Some of the language used for the riddles could present barriers as we also struggled to work some of them out initally. Furthermore, not having a background knowledge of the original Jumanji (1995) film could contribute to this issue, as many of the riddles were featured in the movie.
The randomness and complexity of some of the elements in the game could present challenges for some players which also means it can be time-consuming. Fortunately, the game has ways to adapt its play style to accommodate many of these, which is explored throughout this reflection.
There could be some potential barriers for those with physical impairments – some of the activities involved hopping up and down, hiding in tight spaces and climbing onto furniture. Those with physical impairments or prior injury could find this challenging to navigate. Melanie, for example, suffered a lower leg injury in her childhood which meant she would have been unable to participate in some of the tasks, had she been selected for them. Similarly, Jessica had recently undergone surgery on her shoulder which set further limitations.
There needed to be consideration for the environment the game was played in. It couldn’t be played in public spaces given the nature of some of the tasks throughout. Furthermore, an adequate clear space would be needed to participate and there were some health and safety risks involved. As we were playing, we did need to be conscious of bumping into objects, or ensuring we had enough clear space that we wouldn’t suffer an injury, particularly during tasks which required our eyes to be closed.
Finally, the game only allows for a maximum of four players, which could be perceived as limiting for those wanting to play in bigger groups. The game is designed in such a way, however, that pairing up in teams could potentially work for groups greater than four.
Who might be excluded?
It is a family game but some of the riddle difficulty levels, for example, could mean that it wouldn’t be appropriate for ages less than seven/eight or for those who have a limited understanding of English, especially written. Furthermore, those with Special Educational Needs may struggle with certain aspects of the game such as those with visual, auditory and physical impairments or difficulties with fine motor skills.
How did the game foster creativity and critical thinking?
The game is unique as the events are spontaneous and mostly dictated by luck and the riddles/events presented by the dome at random. The control over what happens next throughout the challenges and events, however, remains with that of the players. This therefore means that every experience of the game is unique as no two games are the same. It promotes the production aspect of Gee’s (2005) principles as we could customize the game and shape it how we wanted to, using the basic rule set as a guideline. Furthermore, the game is traditionally played as a team – while there will still be a first player to make it to Jumanji, the idea is that we are working together to make that happen. If one player loses all three lives, then everyone loses, so this required varying levels of creativity and critical thinking throughout. The team aspect proposed many additional considerations relating to collaboration, strategy, logic and identifying player strengths. Some areas that required lengthy conversations were whether to share lives, who took on a challenge, who might be better at a task, and even who should fail a challenge for the benefit of the team’s progression. That being said, there was also scope to make it more individually competitive due to the ambiguity of instructions on many of the challenge cards and events.
Following on from the latter point, while there were basic rules to the game, they were also open to interpretation. Some of the challenge cards didn’t state who had to complete the challenge, or specifically how it needed to be done. This could be decided as a team and feeds into Gee’s (2005) combined principles of interaction, customization, agency, cross-functional teams, and smart tools and distributed knowledge. We could make decisions collaboratively, using each other’s strengths and trust. There was also the option to play with one or two dice to set the challenge level which feeds into aspects such as challenge and consolidation while making the game pleasantly frustrating. The difficulty of the game was mostly controlled by the players.
As well as having the choice on how we conducted challenges throughout the game, there was a variety of them such as hiding from other players, finding objects around the playing space, listing ten animals in a stampede, hopping on the spot, and blinking contests. Many of these challenges also came with variables such as timers or dice to add an extra layer. This variation centers around Gee’s (2005) principle of situated meanings because the challenge/events spanned across different types of sensory learning such as auditory, kinesthetic, visual etc. While it was previously mentioned that the playing environment could be a limiting factor, it also invoked creativity. When the game asked us to find objects for certain tasks, it left it open to interpretation and we could simply seek out whatever was available in the space we were playing in.
Furthermore, there were a few challenge cards which asked the player questions such as ‘you have just been brought back from Jumanji after being trapped inside for 65 years, what is the first thing you do?’ This offered the player the option to be self-reflective, but prompted critical conversations around the table about what we would prioritise. This promoted the nurturing of skills such as meta-cognition, ethical reasoning, skepticism, inference, reasoning and problem-solving. In Melanie’s case, her answer was eating a cheeseburger!
The game also offered a means to explore survival skills factored into real-world situations which promoted critical responses as well as providing an opportunity for learning something new.
What content was handled? What skills were being activated in the game?
Reading & Comprehension: One of the major aspects of the game involved interpreting riddles and following instructions to accurately complete tasks. We even found ourselves re-reading cards and instructions to make sure we fully understood what was being asked of us.
Team Building & Collaborative Learning: One of the unique aspects of the game that our group loved, was that it was a team game. As a team you had to work together to ensure one person made it to the end. This involved not only sharing ideas and helping each other with tasks and riddles, but we could also give up one of our own lives to keep other players in the game.
Social & Emotional Learning: There were several aspects of social and emotional learning in this game including self management and impulse control, decision making, accountability, and more. We often found ourselves wanting to act on impulse, but that would go against some of the rules set by the game at times. One example was when Melanie and Jessica were not allowed to speak during their task. Melanie immediately began talking, only to quickly remember the rules and go back to being silent. Jessica found herself having to cover her mouth to avoid the urge to laugh or speak to Melanie. Since this was a team game, the group worked together to not only make decisions regarding how to best go about a task, but also regarding accountability as well. The game gives players a lot of freedom in interpretation. Sometimes the rules and parameters of a task were not explicitly clear, we had to work together on how to best interpret them in addition to if we did accurately complete a task or not. As a group we did our best to be held accountable to the rules of the game to make it fair and not an “easy” win. For example, we decided that we had to roll the exact number of spaces to get to the end of the game. There was also the aspect of compassion that came into play as we decided on sharing our limited lives to ensure all players stayed in the game.
Logic: While this game did require lots of creativity, basic logic played a role as well. Many of the riddles were simple to figure out if you thought logically. For example, something swinging in the trees led us to monkeys. Some of the challenges also required us to think logically. For example, finding an object to ward off mosquitos, finding adequate cover from the rain, and finding safe hiding places from a threat. Finally, we used logic and basic math to determine the number of spaces we needed to roll to win the game.
Sensory Learning: The game requires a lot of movement and utilization of the senses for challenges. For example, in some challenges you were blind, you could not speak, you had to get up and move, fit into limited space, and so on. There were sound effects, tactile challenges, and utilization of props.
Survival Skills: Jumanji is a game utilizing aspects of survival. We had to know this information, or we learned it from our teammates. For example, Oliver had a question about how to purify water. Besides boiling it, we didn’t really know of another way to obtain clean water. Melanie offered some knowledge she learned about using sand to strain the water, making it safer to drink.
Numeracy: Some of the challenges involved numbers such as listing a certain number of animals, paying attention to how much time you had left to complete the task, and calculating how many spaces were needed to complete the game.
Time Management: Some of the challenges utilized a timer. We had to manage our time effectively in order to make sure we completed it in a timely manner. One example of this was the decision for each of us to take a challenge dice to roll in order to get four ropes before the timer ran out rather than relying on one person to roll all of them at once multiple times until they got the required number.
Coordination: Certain tasks required a level of coordination. Examples of this were working with our eyes closed, standing on one leg for a certain amount of time, hopping on one leg in the same place, and more.
Focus: Finally, there was an element of focus continually needed throughout the game. Riddles warranted focus on keywords used to decipher the meaning. There were instructions with each challenge that required attention. Finally, while working through challenges, we had to wait for sounds or signals from the game itself to prompt the next step.
How did you assess if learning was happening?
Aside from being able to assess the use of numeracy and reading comprehension, for example, as typical skillsets often seen in assessment, learning was constantly happening throughout this game in several ways.
Discussion & Reflection: After completing a part of the game, our group was continually stopping to discuss and reflect on what we learned or realized from each part. One example of this was learning how the game worked and how to think the right way to obtain success in the game. In the beginning we were overthinking the riddles. After discussion, we learned to take a much more logical approach. Another example was after Oliver’s task to identify another way to purify water, when Melanie then educated us on what she knew regarding the question.
Observation: Certain challenges did not allow for teamwork. Watching how our teammates handled the task, allowed us to learn what would and would not work, and adapt as we went.
Problem Solving/Overcoming Challenges and Obstacles: If problems were indeed getting solved, we knew we were learning and adapting with the game. Working together through these problems facilitated learning. Each challenge we overcame was evidence that we had learned what it took to get through it. One way of this was finding alternative methods to solving problems, such as certain decisions we made in working together based on the parameters set by the challenge.
Decision Making: As the players, we had to make certain decisions on the level of difficulty. We wanted to make it challenging, but fair. The autonomy of the game allowed for interpretation regarding outcomes and successes of the challenges. We were able to determine if we had indeed learned and overcome the challenge.
Failure: Learning from mistakes was a vital part of this game. In the very beginning we got the first two riddles wrong. This was a mistake on our part because we were completely overthinking the clues. You quickly learned how important reading the rules were to find success in the game, or even setting your own working rules, because not following them properly led to mistakes and not succeeding at challenges.
Conclusion
In summary, we would highly recommend this technology for inclusion in a play-based learning toolkit. The ability to shape the game how we wanted it to play out, while also navigating the different aspects of spontaneity, made it entertaining but also offered a gateway to learning through a variety of skillsets (as indicated previously). What set Jumanji apart from other games in its totality was the team element, and the collaborative interpretation of challenges and events to help us ultimately win!
