🐛 Centipede Hill | Exponent Laws Game

Welcome back! 🍂Autumn is here and so is my first project reflection post for Grade 9 Scimatics. For the first project of Scimatics this year, we worked as a team to create a card/board game that used at least 4 exponent laws. I was overjoyed to be able to choose our teams for this project (thank you so much Mr. Harris), meaning I got to work with my two good friends Ava and Sabrina for this project. Thank you both for all your hard work, cooperation skills and being reliable team members! We decided to title our game “Centipede Hill” because… well, to be honest, I forgot why we called it that, but there was a reason (something to do with centipedes being the opposite of snakes…).

How does math make games more complex, interesting, and re-playable?Math is often the centre of what makes games function. It controls player action, points and changes game difficulty. Centipede Hill revolved almost entirely around math. The players had to answer mathematical questions to obtain the amount of spaces they got to move. We had a basic and advanced game versions to help make our game more interesting and increase the complexity and difficulty for people who are re-playing it.

In this Milestone we wrote and formatted the rules for our games. Although I personally I am not a fan of writing, Ava and Sabrina were very efficient at putting our ideas onto the page. My part of the rule making was designing the actual rule book. I used Keynote to arrange the rules with images and examples so that others could easily understand how to play our game. We were able to accomplish the competency “Reasoning and Analyzing: Use logic and patterns to solve puzzles and play games” by creating a ‘point system’ which controlled how many spaces the players got to move. Click here to open a PDF of our game rules or click through the slides below:

Millstone 3 was an exponent laws math test. Math isn’t my strongest subject (yet!), so understandably I had some difficulties with this. Unfortunately, I did a lot worse than I thought I was going to… so yeah, not fun. As we say in PLP it was a FAIL: First Attempt In Learning, so I went back and found what I did incorrectly so I could learn from my errors. Wondering what exponent laws are? Watch this video for a semi-cheesy explanation:

Not doing very well on the test taught me that I have some more work to do to up my game in the math department.

The best part of this project was playing our peers’ games. It was incredible to see all the creativity and ideas my peers had! Seeing others play our game was a great way to see if we’d managed to accomplish the competency “Communicating and Representing: Represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial, and symbolic forms.” Based on the success of my peers playing our game (and Mr. Harris’s feedback), we extended on this competency quite well!

Since Ava, Sabrina and I split up the workload evenly and created a game that could help others learn about exponents, we extended on the competency “Applying and Innovating: Contribute to care for self, others, community, and world through individual or collaborative approaches”

I also got waaayyyy to many photos of our peers playing our game, but you can check out a bunch of my favourites in the slide show gallery below:

It was super fun to see what exponent laws people decided to include. I had a great time playing Alicia and Theryn’s game about infecting other countries with a virus, a rapid fire game created by Clare and Dana (which I lost, because my fast math skills are still under development…) and last, but not least, a fast-paced game of scientist vs. zombie game designed by Faith and Brooke!

I thought this project would be kinda boring since we made a game in another project last year, but I actually really enjoyed this project. I’m really proud of how our game turned out. Make sure to check out my team members’ blogs too (Ava’s blog & Sabrina’s blog). Coming soon… a post on our PLP Humanities 9 project “People and The Environment.” Stay tuned! 👋