Today I will be sharing my experiences with my Exponents Law math game. This project took about three weeks to complete and in that time I learn not only necessary math skills, but also how to successfully work with a partner (Grace ) to complete this task, and without a partner this task could have been much harder.

The first thing we started with was what type of game did we want to create that would be easy to incorporate math into. We had an idea of doing some sort of UNO parody because the goal in UNO is to match different cards in order to have none left and win, but we had to put a twist because it would make the game more fun and easier to incorporate exponents as well. So we did the only logical thing and reversed the game so now the goal was to get to three million because if you use exponents right they can total up to a very large number. 

The goal was to use different cards that you can draw from the main pile to create a number close to the grand number. The game rules were different than most so it is probably easier to just read them rather than me trying to explain them.

Open Tres Milliono

For our first draft we combined our new version of the game along side the exponent rules. This was a good first try but did not quite make sense when playing the game. We did not have enough cards because we thought the game would go quite quickly but it turns out a good game takes strategy and time, and running out of cards was definitely a problem for us. These were smaller problems that we dealt with easily but the next part would change our game even more.

We added something to make it a bit harder for your opponent to win, sabotaging. Now if you were to get a card like a negative or something you did not want, then you could give it to your opponent and they had to make it part of there equation. This added a bit more of a competitive aspect which in the end made the game more interesting and fun. The one thing I would have differently here is maybe made it so that you could only do this a certain amount of times, or only certain cards could do this. 

Third and final draft was just adding and remaking. We made sure that all the cards worked in the game and added some special ones that were good and bad just to make things interesting.

Then we had the opportunity to present our games to another gr.9 math class. I think they really liked our game and I definitely saw some competitiveness which is always something that is great in my opinion. The one thing we actually did during the presentation is changing one of the rules to make the game longer and easier for everyone. We changed one of the rules that I included at the beginning that said each player could only have six cards out at once, so now they each had a part of the table so they had a bigger space to play and not much limit to how many cards they could play. We feel this made the game a bit more fun and easy to play and maybe something we should have done earlier.

In the end I think this was a really cool project that I liked creating and making, but it also challenged us to really think creatively when it came to the exponent laws which I think was and awesome twist that made things more difficult but interesting at the same time. Looking back the one thing I would change is the point system. In feedback that I got it said that keeping track of points in this game was challenging and I agree with that, so instead we could have used physical objects instead to indicate who was winning.

This is definitely something fun and new to try and made me think to how important math is in games.

That’s all for now.