Tag: games

IT’S THE EXPONENT APOCALYPSE

HellooOOooOooOOOOoooOOO and welcome back to another year of PLP blog posts. As you may have guessed, we just finished our first project in Scimatics 9. I found this project to be similar to the game about tectonic plates that we did in grade 8. The end result of this project was to be fun game that used exponent laws. And without further ado, I shall take you through the ins and outs of the creation of my partner and I’s game, the EXPONENT APOCALYPSE.

Starting off

As per any usual scimatics project, this project started with a project start mind map. The project start mind maps are a way to gather all of your knowledge and questions before starting the new project. I tried to write down all of the ways that math is included in games and what I already knew about exponents.

The project

We launched this project with a practise in creating game rules. As a group we were asked to create games that used a certain number of dice and involved addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, in the rules. It was basically a toned down version of the final game that we would be making.

A huge part of this project was incorporating exponent laws into our games. And in order for that to happen we had to first learn about what exponents were and what laws they followed. We did a multitude of Kahoot! quizzes and workbook pages to really start to understand how exponents function.

Throughout the whole project we were thinking about what we wanted our game to be. The rules, the points system, the objectives, even the game pieces. We made many drafts and had our friends test out our game constantly to see if there were any gameplay issues. Weeks later and we had our final game ready for game day. We call it “Exponent Apocalypse”, a mashup between Zombies and math. The goal is to get to the “Lab” at them end of the game board before the other player. You move up spaces by correctly answering the prompts on the cards flipped in front of you. Here, it makes more sense if you read the game rules; Exponent Apocalypse

Core Competencies 

Reasoning and Analyzing: Use logic and patterns to solve puzzles and play games

The points system in our game is quite simple, answer a question correctly and you get to move up one space. We wanted to make sure that we didn’t make it super hard or complicated to win because it’s more fun when you’re not confused half the time.

Communicating and Representing: Represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial, and symbolic forms

This competency mainly focuses on the game rules themselves, if they are clear, complete, interesting, and personalized. Having an obvious theme to the game helped make the game more interesting to play because it gave it a bit of personality. We were going to add in a 5th exponent law to the game but we thought that that may get to complicated for people to remember while playing. Looking back we probably could’ve added another law without jeopardizing the simplicity of the game.

Applying and Innovating: Contribute to care for self, others, community, and world through individual or collaborative approaches

This year I am trying to stay more on track in class. I found that having a good partner like Faith really helped me to use my class time efficiently. Faith and I made an excellent team because our different skills worked alongside each other very smoothly.

Thank god this post is almost done

Well overall I’d say that this project was a success. I learned a lot about exponents and continued to learn about what makes a great game. Hopefully the rest of the projects this year go as smoothly as this one did.

Thanks for reading!

As Always, Brooke.

A game about tectonic plates? How boring…

Ever heard of a tectonic plate? I bet most of you have. But do you know the science behind it? 

As you may have guessed, we learned about tectonic plates for the new project we were doing. The end product of this project is a game about plate tectonics that uses probability to determine outcomes.

We made a list of every question we could imagine on the topic of “How does the movements of Earths tectonic plates cause observable changes and effects?” Here are the questions my amazing partner Cooper and I came up with. You may notice some C’s and O’s and those mark closed ended and open ended questions. 

You also may have noticed that there are questions marked 1,2, and 3. Those are were our top three questions that we came up with and wanted answers to. 

We then started our project start mind map using an app called MindNode. I added the mind map categories of QFT top 3 questions, random questions, key concepts, plate tectonics, game ideas, and tectonic game vocabulary . 

 We did a lot of exercises that built our knowledge of plate tectonics so that we could include the key concepts in our game. We learnt about plate boundaries and faults, the layers of earth and mantle convection, and tectonic disasters. Many workbook sheets were completed to ingrain in us the science behind the movement of tectonic plates. That part of the project was a science curricular competency called; Evaluating: Demonstrate an understanding and appreciation of evidence. I really like learning about cool science concepts so that competency was really enjoyable for me.

We also did work on game probability so that we could calculate the odds of certain events occurring in our games. The use of probability falls under the curricular competency of; Understanding and solving: Develop, demonstrate, and apply mathematical understanding through play, inquiry, and problem solving

Meanwhile all of this time my partner Cooper & I were thinking of ideas and rules for our game. After many ideas and lots of refinement we finally got our game rules written down. We started a cycle of testing certain aspects of our game then refining the rules, testing and refining, testing and refining. 

Questioning and predicting: Demonstrate a sustained intellectual curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest. – Using our newfound knowledge of tectonic plates, we had to prepare for game day, the big end to this project. Game boards were made and pieces were gathered. Dice, cards, and spinners, Oh my! We printed out our final game rules and laminated a ton of cards. And after all of that preparation we were ready for the final test of our game.

Did we do it? Did we make a fully functional game about plate tectonics? I’ll let you decide for yourself. Here is a link to the final game rules: Nothing Left Rules

I usually would have put the driving question at the start of this post but I felt that it fit better here. The driving question was “How are thematic and mathematical elements used in game design?”. I think you can figure this one out by now but just in case you can’t; Our games had to use probability. Dice, cards, spinners, etc. Probability is a mathematical element. If you think about commercial games that are for sale, how many of them use some sort of probability? Probably 90%. Same with thematic elements of games. Our games were based on tectonic plates. Some games have sciencey themes like aliens or viruses, others are murder mystery’s or worlds made of candy. You might think that making a game is just using dice or cards to get a piece from one side of a board to the other, but now I know that there is a lot more that goes into the science and planning behind games.

This was a fun project. It was really cool to be able to learn about something new (tectonic plates) and be able to apply that knowledge into something bigger (a game). I learn best when I am interested in the topic and this project definitely made me interested in tectonic plates and the mystical planet called earth. I grew as a learner in this project when I asked questions, found the answers, and was able to use the answers to aid my game. However I did not do this project alone. I would like to give a big thanks to my amazing partner Cooper, we worked extremely well together and I couldn’t have done any of this project without him.

As always, Brooke.