When I first learned about the Order of Operations in 5th or 6th grade, we were always told to skip over the “E” in “BEDMAS”. As you can see, it stands for “exponents”, though I hadn’t truly understood what those were; which I’m glad to say has now changed.

Our driving question for this project was:

“How does math make games more complex, interesting, and re-playable?”

Mind Map

As usual, I used MindNode to construct a mind map displaying my “need-to-knows” and current knowledge about the project. However, I later decided to decorate my mind map using Procreate. 

Over the course of the past month, we have completed a number of math worksheets on exponents, which you can find my copy of here. I believe this was the most crucial part of our learning process during this project, since this is where the foundation of building knowledge took place. 

Khan Academy Quiz

We also completed a Khan Academy quiz, which I had done much better on compared to a physical test we had completed in class. As a result, I have burnt the physical test within the fiery depths of Mustafar, never to be seen again.

As a class, we discussed and reviewed a number of different Exponent Laws, which set us up for our actual project: designing a game that included exponents. My partner for this project was Gwen; be sure to check out her blog!

Gwen and I bounced a few ideas off of one another, and created multiple drafts of our game rules over the past few weeks. However, after we created our 2nd draft, we received feedback on our game from our peers. Due to a flaw in our game, it was essentially un-playable the way I had initially intended it to be. Though, this helped set us up for success in the long run, since we were able to revise it into our 3rd and final draft of Game Rules. As our PLP teachers love to say, “Failure is the First Attempt In Learning.”

Physical Game Pieces

Although I was ill throughout a duration of our project, Gwen and I worked around that efficiently. I mainly helped revise our game rules, and she independently created our physical game pieces. Many thanks to her!

There were three Core Competencies for this project:

  • Reasoning and Analyzing: Use logic and patterns to solve puzzles and play games.

I believe that I demonstrated this competency to standards. Our game had a detailed points system and clear winning conditions based off of said system. The points system included quite a few mathematical patterns within it.

  • Communicating and Representing: Represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial, and symbolic forms.

Although I believe I did well on representing mathematical concepts in pictorial and symbolic forms through the game rules, I had failed to help create physical game pieces, – due to being sick– which Gwen had to complete on her own. However, we represented four different exponent laws in different ways throughout our game rules, and included examples of how they would play out in our game. We also designed our game pieces together, despite not physically creating them together. As a result, I believe that I did well on this competency.

  • Applying and Innovating: Contribute to care for self, others, community, and world through individual or collaborative approaches.

I feel that I did well on this competency, seeing as I was usually on task during class time, and still tried my best to contribute while I was at home. Gwen and I shared the workload, which made things easier in the long run.

In conclusion, math can influence games in a variety of ways. At their core, many games are based around mathematical concepts, whether advanced or simple. Math is the foundation of many things, which in turn makes them interesting, complex, and overall enjoyable. After all, if we did not have the capability to understand and use mathematical concepts, I think the world would be much more mundane through our lenses.