Coordinate Battleship Lesson Plan

Preparation

To prepare for the lesson: Make laminated copies of the game board (or you can insert in sheet protectors) and make copies of the small paper board. Each student needs a laminated game board and each student will need the disposable paper game board (each student in a pair will create the battleship plan and will also be a guesser).

Introducing coordinate battleship

Ask students to raise their hand if they have ever played the game “battleship” before. Ask students to share some of the rules for playing. Students may say that the object of the game is to sink all the opponents ships by using pegs on a gameboard to show hits and misses. 

Explain to students that they will be playing a game today where they will get to deploy strategies for sinking all the opponents battleships by naming the correct coordinate points to where their partner’s ships lie.  

Pass out the laminated coordinate battleship to each student in the class. Make copies of the smaller coordinate cards and pass those out to each student in the class as well. Make sure to pass out dry erase markers to all students who have the laminated coordinate game board. 

How to play

Share slide two of the slideshow to go over the rules of the game with students.

Tell students that they will take turns at guessing points that their partner plotted. Your partner will respond with either “hit” or “miss.” For example, you call out `(-1, 3)` and your partner does not have that on their board. They would say “miss” and you record the miss by drawing an `\text{X}` over the coordinate point. If you call out a point that is on the partner’s board, they would say “hit” and you record it with an `\text{O}`. This will help you to strategize what ship they are working to sink. When all the points on a ship have been called out, the ship will be sunk. The student who is able to sink all their partner’s ships first wins!