Tectonic Game Board (FINAL OVERVIEW POST)

Hi, Welcome to my blog! This is about the second project we did in symatics 8. This project was mostly about tectonic plates and how they affect our planet. Every project starts off with a driving question and our class is challenged to answer the driving question and for this project our driving question is “How does the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates cause observable changes and effects.” You can’t just answer the driving question on the spot, that’s not how the PLP Program works. You have things called milestones, milestones are basically projects that take you one step closer to answering the driving questions. Once you have reached milestone 6 you should be ready to answer the driving question. In this project we were challenged to make a board game, but not just any board game. Your supposed to incorporate tectonic plates into the board game and rules. For milestone 1 me and my symatics partner Carter were challenged to make some ground rules or basic rules. This was to set some ground rules for our game and what we might want the game to look or be like, this was definitely a rough copy of our game board rules. Here is a picture of our board game ideas, we did our game rules as a mind map which was fun to make, the mind-map also includes questions about certain tectonic disasters and also includes a setting for what I learned in this project:

Milestone 2 I found a little bit harder because we were challenged to come up with 10 science vocabulary words for our board game, this was definitely a little bit of a step up from the other Milestone. Milestone 3 was a test that was to show that we have learned enough about tectonic plates to incorporate them into our game rules and our game board, this was also a little bit harder then the other Milestones, but was a good and fun review of what we have done so far. For Milestone 4 my me and my partner was challenged to make our final game rules, this was very difficult for me and my partner because we still had to make to game board and get everything ready for game day. Making the final game rules was the hardest milestone for me and my partner but was also quite fun because it was a challenge and when we got it done it felt really good. Here is a picture of our final game rules:

Milestone 5 was our complete game, this was one of my favourite milestones. For this milestone we were told to show our complete game, this milestone I think was great because it gave me some time to reflect on how we created the game or even the first rules for the game. Milestone 6 was game day, its were we all come together to show what we have created through this project and gave other people a chance to play other people’s games. I thought this Milestone was important because it gave us a chance to see what other people created and what maybe we should have done better, it was also just really interesting to see what other people have created.

Circular Competencies:

Evaluating and Demonstrating an understanding and appreciating evidence:

For evaluating and demonstrating and appreciating evidence I think me and my partner did a good job. We provided 10 key science concepts and our game pieces visually represented our tectonic concepts. For example, one of our in game science concepts was, Earthquake! (If a earthquake happens whoever is in the zone it happens in, they will get sent back to a nearest continent) In my words, I think we did good when it comes to evaluating and demonstrating and appreciating evidence. It was challenging but we happened to pull it off in the end, which felt really good.

Questioning and Predicting:

I definitely think me and my partner could have done a better job at this. We were at times distracted and not focused on our game concepts or ideas. For example, if Mr. Gross asked me and cater to finish off our game concepts we would probably play games for a while and then finish it. Overall I think we could have done better.

Understanding and Solving:

For Understanding and Solving, I believe we definitely could have done better, we didn’t have much probability and in our game rules we didn’t really incorporate them with the rules probability. For example, In the rules it said “If you land on the lighting bolt on the spinner you will be given a disaster card” but we really should have put the probability of actually getting a disaster card. We could have done better and if we do anything similar to this project we will definitely include more probability.

Overall, this was a very fun project and I would definitely consider this to be one of my favourite projects ever, it taught me how to work as a team, how the earths tectonic plates effect our planet, and most importantly, an answer to the driving question. My answer to the driving question is, The movement of earths tectonic plates cause amazing natural disasters! One of the most observable changes was when all of our continents were believed to be connected one day, and have slowly drifted apart from each other over 200 million years! This was all caused by the amazingly powerful tectonic plates that have created volcanos and even mountains. Tectonic plates are amazing and come to think of it support our whole eco system from collapsing, without tectonic plates we would have volcanos or even mountains! Tectonic plates can also be extremely dangerous, as a result of the 2011 earthquake that hit japan with a whopping 9.1 on the Richter scale! Causing a massive devastating tsunami that stuck japan at around 2:46 PM, The natural disaster caused japans government a whopping 360 Billion dollars! This just shows how devastating tectonic plates can be. It also shows how tectonic plates have helped us grow our economy as it created mountains! This was a fun and very interesting project and I want to thank my partner Carter for helping me succeed in doing this project! I suggest you check out his blog as well, it also includes important information about this project. This project was completely worth it because in the end, We got to watch Ice Age Continental Drift. Until next time, Piece!