Week 11: Learning Math with the Battleship Travel Game

Games are a great way to learn math, and this Travel Battleship Game is no exception. Kids will learn about grids, plotting coordinates on a graph, number lines, and even about reading maps. This will help them immeasurably when they start learning about graphing and x and y axes in math class.

The Trip Clip also does a few special things that the traditional board game can’t to help ease in new players:

• The Trip Clip offers both 8×8 and 10×10 boards. The 8×8 board is less overwhelming, it skips the hardest to find 2 square Destroyer, and will make the game go a bit quicker for younger kids.

• Our printed pages have different letters coordinates set for Player 1 and Player 2, so there’s no way to mix up your board with your opponent’s board.

• You can use the different pen colors on the Trip Clip 4-Color Click Pen to help make it clear when you’ve found a ship vs an empty spot.

And because The Trip Clip Travel Battleship Game is played with pen and paper, you don’t have to worry about any tiny parts getting lost. My family has played this on road trips, on airplanes, while camping, at restaurants – it’s great fun and great learning anywhere you go!

Getting Started

Travel Battleship is a two person game, so you’ll need two sets of printed pages – one set for Player 1, and one set for Player 2. The Trip Clip prints all 4 pages for you.

Player 1:

Player 2:

Hiding your ships

Each player will take their “Hide Your Ships” board, and mark off the squares where each of the 5 ships floating on their grid. Once this is done, they should actually hide the ships by placing the “Find the Enemy Ships” paper on top of their ships, so that their competitor cannot see where any of their ships are hiding.

This works great if you use these printed boards with a small clipboard.  The Trip Clip Clipboard is perfect for this, and you can clip in both of your pages at the same time, allowing you to easily lift the first page and peak at your hidden ships on the second page without showing your partner where your ships are.

Once both players have hidden their ships, they can take turns guessing the coordinates of their opponents’ ships.

 

My kids (7 and 10 in this photo) chose to play battleship while we waited for a table at a restaurant on a recent vacation. This activity is a favorite of ours, especially once my younger son really internalized how that grid system works!