Hello everyone!

It has been a veryyyy long time since I last posted. Summer break ended about a month ago and I was quite busy so I didn’t have time to post anything. I went on a few road trips and a few camps. I watched a lot of Netflix and ate too much junk food. Anyhow, enough about me and more about school. So, in the past month we have been in Scimatics. Me and my parter Clare have been working on an exponent game. Below are all the steps we took. The Milestones, competencies, etc. You know the drill. 

Driving Question: How does math make games more complex, interesting, and re-playable?

Answer: Math makes games more complex by adding different dimensions to them and making the players think harder.

First off we started by generating game ideas. We had some dice and were asked to come up with a math game. This was a good way to start the project because we started to get our creative juices flowing. We came up with a few good ideas that we eventually tweaked and combined to become our final game.

A pretty important stepping stone was our MindMap. It was where we gathered all of existing knowledge and put it into one place. I think this was a good way to get ready for the project because we organized our thoughts and we saw what we had left to learn.

I’m going to skip over the middle Milestones because they were all just building knowledge and learning more about exponents which is boring. Anyhoo, Milestone five was very important. It was where we submitted out final game rules and where we handed in a competed game. This is what we would get our evaluation feedback on.

Here are some pictures of people playing our game:

On the last day of our project, we swapped classrooms with the other Scimatics class across the hall. They played our game and we played the ones that they had come up with. It was really interesting to see what other people had come up with given the same instructions that we had.

Curricular Competencies:

Ahhhhh yes. This is the moment you have all been waiting for. The Curricular Competencies. It has been a while since I last talked about these (about 4 months), so I will take it upon myself to fill you in. Curricular Competencies are basically a way to evaluate your project. Each time we get a new assignment, we also get new criteria. 

Below is what our criteria was for this project:

So usually when I talk about the Curricular Competencies, I go over how I think I did on them. For example, one piece of the criteria was time management. I would give an example of how I excelled at that in class.

Ok, so now we’re actually going to talk about the Curricular Competencies.

Reasoning and analyzing (a clear and simple point system):

I think we did quite well on this. Every time you won a turn, you got a token. First one to 12 tokens won the game. Overall, I think our point system was very simple and was easy to understand. I don’t think there’s that much more to say then I think we had a clean and simple point system.

Communicating and Representing (clear instructions and 4 exponent laws in your game):

Ok, so I think this where we might have struggled a little bit. Our instructions were proof read many times and everyone said they were easy to understand, so that checks off. However, integrating 4 exponent laws into our game was harder. We had 3 solid ones (quotient of a power, product of power, power of a power). However the fourth one was harder. We had the 0 exponent law, but it was definitely not as well put in the game. I think that is something that we could have worked on a little bit more. Getting our final exponent law in our game.

Applying and Innovating (time management and staying on task):

I think I did well on this. One of my besties was sitting right behind me (Brooke) and I never got distracted. I also stayed on task almost every class. I might have gone down some rabbit holes while researching our game, but who doesn’t? In the end thought, I think I did a great job managing my time and staying focused.

Jeepers! That was a long post. Longer then usual…anyhow, I learned so much in this project. I skipped over it, but we did a lot of building knowledge and developing our game ideas. I learned a lot exponents and how they work. We also did a regular high school styled test which is going to prepare me for future tests like that. 

Thank you for reading this post and I hope you have a good days!

Best wishes,

-Dana

P.S. Oops! Ha well I forgot to link our final game rules in here, so if you want to check it out click this link…The no name exponent game!