It all started when I walked into the scimatics class room. I sat down and the first thing I saw was this, 

Right away I thought, step one, learn what on earth an exponent law is. That’s how this project started. The first exercise we did in class was milestone one, dice rolling game. The goal for this milestone was to help us understand what designing a game that involved math was like. We had to make three versions of the game. The first version of the game only had one criteria, we could only use one die. The second version had to have two dice, but it also specified that we had to involve addition and subtraction in our game. The final version had two dice, paper bits and had to include addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Making these renditions of the game alowed me to understand how to make a fun game with math.    

Our second milestone was doing an exponents quiz. Obviously if I was going to make a game that used exponent laws I would need to know how to use exponent laws. In class we did lots of worksheets in Showbie. We learned what exponents are an how to use them. Eventually we had a khan academy quiz, I got 100 percent. After this milestone I felt like I could use exponents in math and apply them to a game, but I still wasn’t sure what an exponent law was.

For our third milestone we began learning one of the most important skills we would need for our final games, how to use exponent laws. At first I found the laws very confusing, but after doing a bunch of worksheets I started to get a hang of it. We learned all the laws, my personal favourite being the multiplication law because it could make some absurdly large numbers. After a few more days of practice we had a test. I have to say I was really nervous for the test, it didn’t help that I was late that morning because of an orthodontist appointment! Once I got the test started I felt really good though, I ended up getting another 100% and I was very proud  about it. 

Next we started milestone four, game rules draft 1. We had started brain storming ideas for the game a few classes before, so now that we were experts at exponent laws we started applying them to our game. I was partners with Angelo and the idea we had for our exponents game was to make a sort of exponents version of crib. We thought that we could have our players creating the laws and them using them to get a score. The highest score would win. We realized that we would have to have cards for bases and cards for exponents to make our game work smoothly, we made the bases red cards and the exponents black cards. We handed in our draft 1   To Showbie an waited for feedback.

Milestone 5, we Have received our feed back form mr.grouse in showbie and were ready to improve our game rules. We realized that to get the largest number in our game, nobody would ever use the division laws because it would just make your number small. We countered this by adding a round where the goal was to make the smallest final result. To make our game rules more clear an understandable we also added pictures, with each rule there was a picture of  how that rule would look when you were playing the game.

Finally we were at milestone 6, this milestone for me was definitely the most nerve racking. Our task was to share our final game copy with another grade 9 math class. I couldn’t help but worry about if they were going to enjoy the game. Would the rules be clear enough for them to understand? Would they learn from the game? I knew that there thoughts on the game we had created could directly effect our marks so the pressure was on. The day arrive and it went great! Our game rules were clear and the other grade nines were actually having fun! 

To conclude, through the process of making an exponent laws game I learned so much about exponents, exponent laws, designing games and organizing my thoughts in a clear and concise way. In the end my game turned out to be a lot of fun and I am so proud of the final product.