Loading Dock is an area game about tiling the plane and about finding the area of a shape that is not a rectangle. Every truck backs in already carrying something, so the free floor space is an L, a notch, or a staircase rather than a tidy rectangle — and students have to decide how much room is really there before they tell dispatch a number. The scaffolding comes off one layer at a time. The first trailer arrives with the unit grid ruled onto its floor and both side lengths written down. The second keeps the numbers but takes the grid away, and students chalk the grid in themselves. From the third level nothing is written on the trailer at all, the floor is far too big to count, and the only tools are a tape measure and a piece of chalk. Six levels, five jobs each, about five to eight minutes a level.
Each level is five jobs. Levels 1 and 2 run four to six minutes; the big decks on Levels 4 and 6 take closer to eight because there is more to measure and more to add. Four correct out of five unlocks the next level, progress dots along the top show how far into the shift a student is, and unlocked levels are saved in the browser.
The game is built for Grade 6, where finding area by composing and decomposing is the standard, and it lines up with the opening unit of most Grade 6 sequences. Levels 1 and 2 reach back to Grade 3 and 4 work — area as a count of unit squares, and the area formula for a rectangle — so a Grade 6 student who is shaky on those can start at the beginning without it feeling babyish, because the trucks and the money do not change.
It gets loaded exactly as they called it, and the truck leaves. Call too many and the trailer fills while the surplus crates are set down on the dock beside it, counted and outlined in red. Call too few and the truck pulls out with bare floor showing. Either way the correct capacity is named once the doors are shut and money comes off the shift. Being told “not quite” and being shown eleven crates stranded on the dock are not the same lesson, and the second one is the one students remember. Unfinished working — a half-ruled grid, a blank row, a piece that is not yet a rectangle — is never penalised; only the number is.
From Level 3 the game checks the working, not just the total. It rebuilds the pieces from the lines the student chalked and asks whether each one is really a rectangle, whether each number matches the piece it was written on, and whether they add to the total. There is no single correct set of cuts — cut an L into two pieces left-to-right or top-to-bottom and both pass, as does measuring the whole trailer and subtracting the cargo. What does not pass is one number with no decomposition behind it, which is what a student who counted every square would produce.
Because counting what you laid down is the question. A tally on screen would answer it. Nothing states a quantity anywhere: the manifest names the goods and the crate size and says only “fill the free floor”, because any number printed on the ticket would sit within a crate or two of the answer. The game also never highlights where to cut and never pre-labels an edge. What it does do is carry the call out — see the next question.