A House of Cards

Hey guys, for the last month or so PLP 9 has been working on a project for Scimatics, or more specifically, math. For this project we were tasked with creating a game that used exponent laws in some way. We also had to use the curricular competencies to make this project easier on us we were partnered up with someone else in the class, my partner was Noah. However before I get into the game itself I’m going to talk about a milestone we had to complete first.

The milestone that we had to complete was three drafts of a dice game that used operations as a way of scoring points. We were put into groups of three or four and given a whiteboard to write our rules down on and a die. This milestone was basically a compact version of what we had to do for our card game, create a game using math principles and revise that game continuously to make it as good as it could possibly. The difference between this milestone and our actual final project was that, first of all, we did all of the drafts in one class. However, the main difference was that for the each of this milestone’s drafts something new was added that we had to use in our game. What we found was that it was a lot easier to create a game if you worked off of an already existing game and changed or added rules to accommodate the requirement that were given to use for our game by Mr.Gross.

After the dice games we began to use our knowledge of exponents and games for the previous activity to create our first draft of our card game. For about a week Noah and I tossed around different card games that we could base our exponent game on and we finally decided on a version of 21. The main idea that we started with was that players would use the cards provided to try and use the laws  and knowledge of exponents to get as close as possible to 3,486,784,401 without going over. Though out our drafts Noah and I would play our game to see what was and wasn’t working in our game so we could continuously improve our game. I also used these test sessions to improve my understanding of the curricular competency: Applying and Innovating. I also used the next competency, Reasoning and Analyzing, to make sure that the rule made sense and were logical. I also used it to help Noah and me to come up with the idea of forcing the players to use their knowledge of exponents to do mental reasoning on how to get the highest number. The Big Idea: “Computational fluency and flexibility with numbers extend to operations with rational numbers” helped guide the main idea of our game, using cards to create an equation to get to a number, which in turn helped my understanding of the Big Idea itself.

All in all what I learned from this project was to use all the time that is given to you to continuously improve whatever you’re making because you never know what could or couldn’t work. At the time it may seem like a good idea but if you go back to it the next day you may find that that genius idea that you had yesterday turned out to be a pile of garbage.