Wow!! Another project gone by…this project was about creating a game based on tectonic plates. We had to incorporate 10 scientific theories in our game. Our game had hot spot, convection current, and earthquake cards to name a few. The driving question was not “How are thematic and mathematical elements used in game design?”. Below, I will list all the steps that it took for us to be able to make our game and answer the driving question. 

Stepping Stone 👣 – One of the really important stepping stones that we did for Milestone 1 was creating a mind map in MindNode. This was really useful for me because it helped me visualize what I knew and what more I needed to learn. This is evidence of my learning because later on, we would come back to this and add more questions, answer, and general knowledge that we had.

 

Milestone 1 💎 – This milestone was really about us getting some basic information on how to create a successful game. We started by just coming up with a simple game idea that would change over the course of this project. It was really a first attempt to get our creative juices flowing. It would also eventually show us that we needed to learn a lot more about tectonic plates before we could continue to make our games. 

Milestone 4 💎- This milestone was really important because this is where we set our game ideas in place. We wrote up a nice copy and finished it off with diagrams and our probability that we had learned how to do in milestone 3. We then came up with a list of pieces that we needed.  

Milestone 6 💎- This is where we showcased all of our hard work! We got to teach people how to play our game through our game instructions that we spent so much time on. We also got to play other people’s games. It was really cool to see what other people had made with the same guidelines that we had. People had made board games with moving tectonic plates, dice rolling games, and card games like ours. 

Curricular Competencies – For this project, we had to incorporate 10 key scientific theories into our game, which I think we did very well. We did this by adding major scientific theories that had to do with tectonic plates. Examples would be our hot spot cards, convection current cards, earthquake and eruption cards. We extended this competency by adding 13 key scientific theories instead of just 10. I feel like we used our class time efficiently for the most part and we included three very good examples of probability in our final game rules. Our events of probability were well thought out and we spent a lot of time coming up with the perfect probabilities to add into our final game instructions.

Overall, this project was really helpful for learning about tectonic plates, convection currents, hot spots, etc. We also did it in a really fun way – we got to make a game!! And through making the game, we learned about tectonic plates! So cool. Anyhow, thank you for reading, and as always, there will be more projects coming soon to read about. 

Best wishes, 

-Dana

P.S. Thank you to my amazing partner Cole! You really helped us make our final game amazing, thank you so much!