IssieDice: How do YOU play?

Have you heard about IssieDice? It’s a customizable dice app created by the Technology Center at Beit Issie Shapiro and SAP Labs, Israel. You can read more about the app and how to create your own dice on our blog post.

• Dice to pick turns or partners. Create photo dice of students in the class or group to be used as a fun way to choose turn order or choose a partner for activities. In this photo you can see children in the Taf Lataf Kindergarten during a creative activity. On their turn, each student rolls three dice, one of students, one of colors and one of art tools. In this way the child rolling the dice tells the friend who came up on the die what to do on the paper and in what color.  We love this idea!

 

• Make-a-wish Dice. Have a student or a staff member leaving? Someone has a birthday? Use IssieDice to create a die of greetings or wishes to help the students think of something to say. If they don’t like the wish that comes up, roll again!

 

• Letter/Word Games – Create three dice with a variety of letters. Roll the dice and see how many words you can make with those three letters. Or create dice with words from the current vocabulary lesson. Write a sentence with the words that appear.
• Dice Wars – Play the classic card game, War, with dice. Play with multiple iPads, each with their own dice. Roll to see who wins. Grade the activity from one die to up to three dice per iPad where students have to add their own numbers together to compare their totals to see who wins. Add tokens so that in each round the winner gets a token. After a set number of rounds, the one with the most tokens wins the game.

 

• Make favorite games more accessible. Some favorite childhood games come with special dice, or with no dice at all. For a child with severe physical disabilities, game play is often difficult to access, from rolling dice to drawing the cards to moving the pieces. For the game shown below, we used IssieDice to create two dice, one with the numbers 1 and 2, and the other with colors. With only a touch of a hand to the screen, the child can roll the dice and start his own turn.

 

• Dice for active play. Create one die of activities in the room and another with numbers. Students take turns rolling the dice and doing what they say, for example, if the trampoline and the number 5 are rolled, then the student jumps on the trampoline 5 times.
• Draw-a-Face Game – Play with two or more children. Have the essential features on the sides of the die. Roll to see what features you get to draw. You can only start your picture when you roll the head shape. Take turns, and the first person to finish their face wins. This activity can be adapted to fit any theme or holiday, such as draw a house, draw a snowman, etc.

 

• “Scattergories” – Have one die with categories, one die with single letters, and one die with numbers. Write the number of words for the category starting with the appropriate letter according to what shows up on the dice. For example, if your dice roll is 3, L, Food you need to come up with three types of food starting with “L”.
• As a motivator/randomizer for other activities – In this activity children are working on visual perceptual and fine motor skills, scanning the field and using tongs to pick up the hidden animals. Using IssieDice we created a die of the hidden animals, and the child rolls the die to see which animal to look for and pick up.

 

*Great Tip Include the students in creating the dice. In this way, students can work on a variety of skills including, spelling, typing, and problem solving. They also improve their digital literacy, learning to work with internet searches, moving back and forth between apps, and becoming familiar with different app interfaces.

The options are endless! It’s up to you!

If you have any great ideas, we’d love to hear about them.  Happy Rolling!