Monkey Hunt

Paul Carrington

OBJECTIVES:

1. To provide a points-based scoring system for class quizzes and other team activities.

2. To hunt monkeys.

After the Typhoon Game began to lose its novelty I invented Monkey Hunt as a slightly more complicated alternative. It’s loosely based on the Minesweeper game you've been playing on your PC for several years, but instead of avoiding the mines, the purpose is to locate the monkeys in order to win bonus points.

PROCEDURE:

1. You have to make the Monkey Hunt Cards yourself. This can be time consuming but if you laminate them for repeated use it’s worthwhile. You need something like 25-36 cards (enough to form a 5x5 or 6x6 grid), each about 15 square centimetres in size. On 3-5 of these cards you need to draw (or print) monkeys, and the other cards are adorned with either one or two bananas.

2. The cards are attached to the whiteboard with magnets, face down. It is important to follow an exact design determining what card goes where. A monkey must be surrounded by cards with 2 bananas, and single bananas can go everywhere else. For example, refer to the grid below:

3. If you turn over a card with just 1 banana, you know there is not a monkey in the immediate area (i.e.: touching that card). If you turn over a card with two bananas however, you know there is a monkey hiding somewhere near by (i.e.: touching that card). The rationale for this system is, of course, that monkeys like bananas and tend to dwell in areas of higher banana concentration.

4. Now you’re ready to hunt! The students are split into 4-6 teams and play a quiz game. This could be a regular question and answer activity, or a variation (categories, pictionary, etc). If the question is answered correctly they win one point. They can also choose one card from the grid. One Banana is worth one point, two Bananas are worth two points, and a Monkey is worth five points.

NOTES:

• Setting up the cards on the whiteboard can take a long time because you have to follow an exact pattern. So try to do this before class to avoid wasting time.
• If you use too many monkeys the grid has to be really big to fit in all the Bananas. This can slow the game down and takes a long time to prepare, so don’t overdo it.
• To spice things up you can add some variations to the cards. I usually play with three or four monkeys, but one of these is the Monkey King, worth ten points. I also have Blue Bananas which let the students pick another card, and I sometimes play with the Purple Monkey. Catching this endangered critter is ethically dubious so the students lose all their points.