The driving question for this project was “How are thematic and mathematical elements used in a game design?” And my group found a pretty good way to answer it. We made a mind map at first that we put all of our ideas on for the game.

 

We put some ideas for including elements that have to do with tectonic plates but not enough so we made a list especially for those kinds of ideas on a notability document. 

We thought that it would make a pretty good game so we tried it out. I and my teammate made a first draft for the game rules that we thought was good so we made a temporary game board to try it out. The main principle of the game was that on every couple of spaces, there would be a tsunami, earthquake or volcano space and if you land on it by rolling the dice, one of your friends would pick up a trivia card and read it to you. If you answer it right, you get a tool card and stay on the space, but if you answer it wrong you have to go back a certain amount of spaces depending on which one you landed on. Some other things could happen in the game but you can look for yourself right here “Magma madness final rules“.

We also made some game characters and a new game board, later on, that looked like the following image.

That ended up being our final project, the one that most people in the class played on game day. We asked a couple of people what they thought about the game and they all said that it was easy to understand and easy to play. Which was our goal.

For the first curricular competency, well I already pretty much talked about it at the beginning of the blog post but I will talk about it anyway. The theory of plate tectonics was for sure the central theme of the game and we had 10 key science concepts described.

For the second curricular competency, it was a little hard with sam making lots of noise but we still got everything in on time and was one of the first groups to finish.

And for the last competency originally everything was all good but then we changed up the game board a bit so some of our calculations were no longer correct.

To summarize, I found this project fun because I’ve never done anything like it before and I hope I can someday do something like it again but maybe harder.