How to run a Silent Teacher Maths activity

• Prepare the link in advance to give to the players with the course selected (or have the page prepared and already open in their browser).
• Avoid talking to them about the concept being tackled. Silent Teacher has no text or script, so this is the time to take advantage of that! Instead, say something like: "Today, we’re going to play a puzzle game."
• Warn them that "This game is quite unusual... you are going to have to get it wrong in order to succeed! Sounds strange, doesn’t it?"
• The first level of the maths courses is a warmup designed to unsettle the player and put them in the right mindset. They need to understand that they will be solving puzzles through trial and error, and that this is not a quiz to evaluate their knowledge. The answers to the first questions (with one cat’s paw) cannot be guessed without trial and error. The facilitator needs to introduce this aspect, and stay with the players for the “cats’ paw” stage.
  
  Here is an example of a way to do the introduction:
  
  
  "So, let’s start... What is the value of cat’s paw 22?"
  The participants generally look at us wide-eyed at this point...
  "You don’t know? Didn’t you cover that last year?"
  We often add to this if there are parents present too, and we ask them the same question, acting surprised that they don’t know
  then we release the tension and reassure them:
  "Actually, that’s normal, you couldn’t know because this game invented “cat’s paw 22”!!! ... Right, tell me your favourite number"
  "um... 7"
  
  "ok, I’ll try 7...... ah no, it wasn’t 7, it was 23... well, never mind. Let’s try again... What is the value of cat’s paw 13?"
  "..."
  
  "Pick another number at random..."
  "um... 3?"
  
  "Ok, let’s try... ah no, it was 14... Strange. For 22 the answer was 23, and for 13 it was 14. Right, let’s try again, cat’s paw 31?"
  After a while, someone will exclaim: "I’VE GOT IT!!!", we test their hypothesis, and then after a few successful attempts the game moves on to a different symbol.
• Once you have moved on to the symbol after the “cat’s paw”, let the players manage on their own, without you intervening.
• If they get stuck, avoid giving answers or technical explanations. Only do this as a last resort!
  • If you notice that the player has only tried one or two answers to the question they are struggling with, tell them that it’s normal not to have found the answer and that it’s a puzzle, and encourage them to keep trying.
  • If the player has already tried to answer the question many times, go back through the answers they have given, draw their attention to the most interesting ones and make them read them again with a view to helping them to recognise a rule. “Look, here you said 26 when it was actually 15. And then here, the answer was 10. Why?”
• After the session, give a debrief on the concepts tackled. It’s finally time to put the concepts discovered into words, as often the player has intuitively understood but doesn’t know how to express it in words, and requires the help of the facilitator to take a step back.