Guess My Rule Revisited

We present classroom research on a variant of the guess-my-rule game, in which nine-year-old students make up linear functions and challenge classmates to determine their secret rule. We focus on issues students and their teacher confronted in inferring underlying rules and in deciding whether the conjectured rule matched the rule of the creators. We relate the findings to the tension between semantically and syntactically driven algebraic reasoning. (Contains 4 footnotes and 1 table.) [For complete proceedings, see ED500859.]