3 Places to See the Coordinate Plane in Action

I was browsing through the book Family Math and found a nifty game called Hurkle. It goes a little something like this:

1. Someone picks a place on the coordinate plane (in secret) for Hurkle to live.
2. Others guess Hurkle’s home by giving coordinates and pointing out those coordinates.
3. When they are wrong, they are given a hint of which way to go (from their guess) to find Hurkle.

The coordinate “space” is around too.

This made me think of the conversation I had with a neighbor the other day while walking our children to the park. When Scotty beams someone in Star Trek, he needs coordinates. But those coordinates must be measured from some origin (0,0,0) in the universe to make any sense. So where’s the origin?

A student of mine long ago found that the origin was Earth. My neighbor argued it should be Vulcan – apparently they started the United Federation of Planets.

And we can find coordinates at work in board games.

With thoughts of these two in my mind, I wonder what ever happened to the game of Battleship. It’s a great game of coordinates along with logic. Once you hit a ship, you have to go in each direction to determine how big the ship is and in what direction.

I’m excited about looking around my world today for more coordinate systems. Where do you see them in your world? And how do you apply them in your teaching? Leave your thoughts and ideas in the comments.