Sports have always been one of the biggest things in my life so I was suer excited when I found out I was allowed to make one for school. Even before this unit my brother and I had made up a few sports to play with friends and family. However none of those would’ve worked with the limited amount of supplies we were given in class.

The supplies were:

  • A roll of duct tape
  • two squash rackets
  • a whiffle ball
  • a stack of plastic cups
  • a bag of ballons
  • a spool of string

To complete this project we used the launch cycle as a way to make progress. The launch cycle is an acronym used to show stages that can be used when doing many things. It coincides with project based learning in a lot of ways. Mainly by always critiquing and fixing things. This is a diagram of what the launch cycle looks like.

My group for this project consisted of Jordyn, Kyle, and Ben. We all started brainstorming ideas right away. We had to make a web of ideas that included all the things nescasary for a sport. This made me realize how much more there are to sports than we sometimes think. We had to ask ourselves things such as what is the goal of your sport? How will you win? Will you take turns? Will it be timed or will it end when you’ve reached a final score or a destination? Will you play it indoors or outdoors?

Ben had the idea to somehow attach the cups to the rackets in order to create something very different from already existing sports. We ended up sticking with this idea the whole time but added a lot to the game. In class one day we did a survey to ask our classmates questions about how they liked sports. My question was Do you prefer team sports or individual sports. The results were very lop sided as 17 people said team and 4 people said individuals.

So after the survey our group came to the conclusion that it should be a team sport, it shouldn’t have much waiting during game time, it should be end to end, and it should be constantly moving. We found it really hard to come up with a team sport so we made it a sport with partners. We thought it was close enough. The next few classes we just got to play around with the supplies to see if our ideas worked and if it didn’t to come up with a few more ideas. Once we had done this we had basically an established sport. We called it Cupball. The way it works is simple. You and your parter each have a cuppette (racket with the cup tied to it) and you try to pass the ball back and fourth to each other as may times as possible in 2 minutes. If the ball bounces and then goes in the cup it is 1 point and if the ball goes straight into the cup its 2 points. If you get 15 points in a row you get an extra 20 seconds however no one was able to do that. On launch day (the day we played the games with our classmates) we were told to either make an instructional video or a list of instructions. My group decided to make a video because we thought it would be more fun to do. Some clips are hard to understand (the room was pretty loud).

Everyone liked our game and I had a really fun time playing the other games. Overall I really enjoyed this project. It gave us a lot of room to just brainstorm and make the game truly ours. None of the games that I played were similar to each other which I thought was super cool since we all had the same supplies. I’d love to do another project like this again however I would also like to do this with the choice of supplies giving me more creativity.