Several of the ideas in my brainstorming are simple modifiers to the rules or board of traditional hopscotch. A dynamic-ruleset version of hopscotch would change these rules mid-game, either by participants playing cards that they personally own (ala Magic: The Gathering), or from a 'hand' (ala Fluxx). A fully explored ruleset would decide when and how rules could be added and removed, in such a way that conflicting rules wouldn't coexist.
Rules could fall into distinct categories such as 'hopping method,' 'marker-pitching method,' 'board design,' and so on, creating the opportunity for combinations that change each of the original rule areas, creating a novel gameplay during each gaming session.
Requiring either a special board surface or pressure-sensitive shoes (bluetooth shoe integration?) "Dance Dance Revolution - Hopscotch Mix" would require players to keep to the beat of a song. A more involved game would involve more complex predefined patterns for hopping the board, either by traversing the squares in a different order, by rearranging the board layout itself into other shapes or grids, or both.
Scoring could be tied to a combination of performance and difficulty level, as in competition diving.
A square grid layout (5x5, 6x6, etc.) could be generated with randomly assigned letters chalked in to the various squares. Players would pitch their markers into the space they wanted to start on, and would start in that square and progress to adjacent squares (either immediately adjacent or corner-adjacent), spelling out a word. They would garner points based on the length of the word they formed. They would lose points or rounds by misstepping, misspelling, or running out of time.
The game would be turn-based, becoming progressively more difficult as the more easily-seen words are found and used. The round ends when a final time limit is reached, or when a player who is already behind cannot find a word in their round's given time.
It's been shown that people remember things better when more than one portion of their brain is involved in the process. For example, people readily remember song lyrics because the process involves a combination of the musical and rhythm-specific portions of the brain with the linguistic and semantic aeras and the emotional areas. Similarly, mneumonic memory devices depend on creating visual counterparts to more abstract knowledge to better fascilitate their memorization. Keeping this in mind, the "Fitaly Jumpboard" is a memory aid to help students with spelling difficult words.
Named after the "Fitaly keyboard" layout, designed for optimal composition by pen-tap on PDA and other pen-input devices, Fitaly Hopscotch is a solitary study-aid. Given a list of spelling words to memorize, the student 'hops' out the words on the Fitaly layout. Quickly becoming familiar with the layout of the characters, the student quickly becomes adept at hopping out the proper path for the given word. This sense-memory of hopping the word patterns guides them when it comes time to actually use the words in practice. Hearing the word, and spelling out the first few letters in his head, while picturing the Fitaly jumpboard, he easily recalls the pattern, and hence the spelling, of the word in question.
Abandoning the marker portion of hopscotch completely, this form of hopscotch would be played on an interactive pad with lights and sensors. Like the memory game 'Simon', a pad would light up and the player would have to jump to that pad. Then the game would add another step to the sequence, and the player would have to repeat the pattern with the added step, progressing until they either miss-step, forget the pattern, or take too long completing a sequence.
Mixing hopscotch with the forms and kata of martial arts, this is a means of turning hopscotch from a single-play competitive game for 1-5 players into a culture and an art.
Using a much more complex hopscotch board, with some non-contiguous tiles, the player combines precision hopping with dance and aesthetic form and composition, executing a 'dance,' or 'kata' on the standardized hopscotch grid.
Given a minimal set of bounding rules involving what constitutes a legal move (never letting both feet touch the play surface at the same time, never stepping outside of a legal space, etc), players could be judged on measures of subjective beauty. Players would participate in structured competitions with impartial judges, as well as showing off on the street with their friends, ala breakdancing.