Hello welcome back to my blog! If you didn’t know I’m Declan and hope you enjoy.

I made a science board-game for a school project! Let me explain, this project that were doing in school is about the continental drift and the plate tectonics and how, why and where they move. We also learned about the outcome of the plates shifting. The driving question for this project is “How are thematic and mathematic elements used in game design” which imposed the question of what the “game design” part meant. It turns out that we where actually making a board game about science and plate tectonics.

We started learning about the whole relationship of the earths core, the continental drift, earthquakes and other things like hot spots and mid ocean ridges. Now that we had learned all  about the topic we could start making our game. My great partner Nolan and I started coming up with game ideas in milestone 1, and we  developed and learned all the way to milestone 6.

Answer to driving question

The driving question is “How are thematic and mathematic elements used in game design”

In my opinion the answer is something like this: most board games aren’t realistic, they rely  on all sorts of fictional things like magic, monsters or superheroes. But on the flip side, there are lot of games (some including the fantasy ones) that have science and/or mathematic concepts in them. A lot of the concepts affect the rules of the game, some affect the characters in the game and anything in-between. These elements are used to make some of the most famous games we know like: pandemic, chess, puzzle games and many more.

Competencies

1. Questioning and predicting:

For this competency I expressed curiosity and a thought process for asking questions and looking ahead. Milestone three really helped me learn this competency and understand and be interested in plate tectonics and how and why they work. In milestone three I inferred a lot of things about volcanoes and earthquakes. I also learned this competency in Millstone

2. Evaluating:

For this competency I expressed an understanding and appreciation of evidence. And learned a general knowing of the topic. Milestone two really helped show this and learn this skill as related to the project. In Milestone two I showed this by paying attention to the information and knowing what the information was. This competency was also in milestones four and five

3. Applying and innovating:

This competency was only in milestone six but I still learned about it. I showed this competency by expressing and sharing my game with my classmates, and gave feedback to my classmates on their projects. In this way we could learn a lot from each other.

What I learned

I learned all about the science behind earthquakes, volcanoes, continental drifts, tsunamis and a whole lot of other things related to that. We learned to share our work and explain our concepts and demonstrate what we worked on. I didn’t know a little bit about the topic before from a past project but not nearly as much a I know now.

My favorite par of this project was learning about how hot spots created Hawaï which is now a major vacation destination. I like how it was all created by a bubbling mass of magma under the ocean floor.