This game provides children with opportunities to engage in classificatory reasoning. Children try to guess their opponent’s mystery person by asking yes/no questions and, based on the answers, eliminating possibilities.
When they first begin to play this game, children frequently ask questions that are not very efficient. For example, they may ask, “Is your person the policeman?” As they become better able to play this game, children learn how to ask questions that have the potential to eliminate more faces, such as questions about hair color, glasses, hats, etc.
The coordination of affirmations and negations needed to play this game successfully is quite complex. For example, if a child asks whether or not the other player’s person wears glasses and that person answers “No,” the child must then reason that if the person does not wear glasses, then he or she must turn over (eliminate) all the faces that do wear glasses. This can be tricky for young children.
One serious criticism that can be lodged against this game is that the majority of the faces are white and male. Currently, the face cards that come with the game include 19 males and 5 females; 19 faces are white, while 5 appear to be persons of color. This is clearly unacceptable, especially if the game is used in ethnically and racially diverse classrooms.
The game can be made more diverse by substituting other faces for the ones that come with the game. This is made easier by the widespread availability of scanners, digital cameras, and color printers. Faces of children in the classroom wearing hats, glasses, wigs, false beards, or other costumes can be used to create interest.
Guess Who is made by Milton Bradley.
Recommended # of players: 2
Click here to download the game.