[Math] Mathematical games interesting to both you and a 5+-year-old child

mathematics-educationsoft-questionteaching

Background: My daughter is 6 years old now, once I wanted to think on some math (about some Young diagrams), but she wanted to play with me…
How to make both of us to do what they want ? I guess for everybody who has children, that question comes up.
Okay, I said to her: let's play a game which I called "Young diagram" for her:
we took a sheet of paper and I tried to explain to her what a Young diagram is, she was asked to draw all the diagrams of some size n=1,2,3,4,5…

Question: Do you have some experience/proposals of "games" which you can play with your children,
which would be on the one hand would make some fun for them, on the other would
somehow develop their logical/thinking/mathematical skills,
and on the other hand would be of at least some interest for adult mathematicians ?

Related MO questions:

“Mathematics talk” for five year olds
it is quite related to the present question, but slightly different –
it is about a single presentation to children, while the present question
is about your own children with whom you play everyday, you can slightly "push",
and so on…

How do you approach your child's math education?
it is also related, but the present questions has a slightly different focus:
games interesting for children and adults. The book by Alexandre Zvonkine, "Math for little ones" (in Russian here), recommended in answer there – is really
something related to the present question.

Which popular games are the most mathematical? is NOT directly related,
but may serve as kind of inspiration for answers…


I think Allen Knutson's answer on “Mathematics talk” for five year olds:

I've spoken (to 5+ years old) about the "puzzles" that Terry Tao and I
developed for Schubert calculus, like the left two here:

can be a nice example of an answer to the present question as well:
on the one hand there is something to explain to the child and some colorful pictures,
and on the other hand that is about research level math …

Best Answer

One evening at the dinner table, when my oldest daughter was 3 or 4, I was in a teasing mood, and I called her a goose. She didn't want to be a goose, so she refuted the claim, "I am not a goose!" Then I told her to prove me wrong. After some back and forth, she realized that her cause would benefit from some distinguishing feature: "A goose has feathers, but I don't have feathers, so I'm not a goose." I was impressed, so I chose not to continue the teasing by concluding she was a plucked goose.

So began our game "Prove me wrong," in which I make wild claims for her to refute. In the modern version of the game, I will respond to her "proofs" with more refined claims. As a mathematician, it is quite the guilty pleasure to construct these logically sound but apparently absurd refinements. For the child, the game presents a fun way to navigate silly ideas. In the end, she's refining her ability to apply basic logic.

On a good day, I will bring "Prove me wrong" into the classroom. When I introduce matrix multiplication in linear algebra, everyone has seen it before, and so I inject some "fun" by claiming that multiplication is commutative. The more outspoken students read my smile and speak up with an emphatic "No, it isn't!" I then proceed to make my case by multiplying $1\times 1$ matrices and $2\times 2$ matrices that happen to commute. Eventually, a student suggests that I put variables in the entries of my $2\times 2$ matrices.