Playing with dominoes

[Yelena McManaman]

So we played dominos today (not the kiddy ones, just the regular ones with dots). I don't really know domino rules so usually we just line them up and get them to tumble down :) But today Mark started building a flat shape out of them. He said he was building a space shuttle. When I looked, I noticed that he carefully lined up 2 dominos, side-by-side, that each had matching number of dots on one side. He didn't line them up like he would if playing dominos, so I didn't think much of it. Then I noticed that he did it with the next pair as well. And the next one. Then he said that his shuttle was missing a cargo bay and picked up another domino, laid it on top of the first row. The domino he picked, again, had 1 half matched to the one half of the domino right underneath. So I figured this is too much to be just a coincidence. Ok, so here's what happened next - the bottom of his "shuttle" had two dominos. One had the blank bottom half (no dots) and the other one - 6 dots. He looked through his pile of dominos and picked up the one that was 3/3 (3 dots on each side) and placed it horizontally right under these two (supposedly, that was the engine).

 

Well, I discounted that one as a coincidence although he did seem to pick through a couple other dominos before making his choice. But then we tried building a road of dominos and I noticed that he picked the right pieces without counting the dots, just by estimating at a glance. So then I thought this could be a good game for simple multiplication or addition? 

 

Yelena