Huh, my daughter and I taught her first grade class SET last year (I did most of the pedagogy…). They seemed both able to learn it and engaged. It wasn’t in a math circle setting, but a lesson to the whole class. Would be cool to investigate the differences!
Yeah Set has been dear to me since I was about 5 years old, and I remember bringing it into class for "favorite board game day" in 1st grade (so when I was 6). Really surprised the kids didn't like it!
There's a LOT of math you can do with it too, starting with some modular arithmetic. and I guess just the idea of abstracting the attributes to 0, 1, and 2. Then you can do a little bit of group theory and how the game is Z3^4 (iirc this is the right notation? been a while), 4 copies of Z3. And there are similar card games that represent other games that you can print out cards for if they're getting excited about group theory, so you can talk about axioms of groups, and how the games represent the groups, and why it makes sense.
Also you can introduce a bit of programming too and explain like how would you teach a computer how to play this game using the invariant property that a definition of a set is that sum c_i = 0 for all i 0 -> 3. and you can also easily generalize the game to other lengths by adding additional traits (background color of the card to add one) or fewer (remove bg color of the symbol).
We played Set with my son when he was ~6.5yo, and he immediately loved it. After a couple of games, he was spotting sets almost as quickly as we were. But his performance and interest varied based on distraction, tiredness etc.
If you want a one-player Set game, there's a nice open source one here:
The 'AI' looks for solutions randomly. Every 2 seconds (in easy mode) it picks two of the visible cards at random, and sees if the card needed to make a set is visible.
If your kid is totally new to Set, you probably want to adjust the delay to 5 seconds or something.
This looks promising. I like the breadth of customization options.
I was confused at first because clicking 'Play game' took me to a screen that never loaded a set of cards. But then I realised you must click 'New game' first, before 'Play game'.
~6 seems to be the right age. I tried with with my kiddo at 5 and with another kid when they were 5 with no success. A bunch of first graders, on the other hand, were quick studies.
