Symphony Quest

Over the past couple months, PLP 9 has been hard at work on our “Like Terms Project” in math class. This project came after we completed our unit in which was mainly about like terms and polynomials. We learned that like terms are terms whose variables are raised to the power, which means we can group them together to make one, larger term. We also learned that polynomials are expressions containing multiple terms. However, we can get more specific. A monomial is an expression with only one term, a binomial has two terms, and a trinomial has three. Once you get past three it’s just known as a polynomial.

So now you know what we had been learning about, let’s talk about the actual project. This project had very little restrictions, in fact, pretty much the only criteria was that it had to include the use of polynomials and like terms, other than that, it was up to us. We were given partners, and I was partnered with Emily. By the time we were given partners though, it was less than a week away from Spring break, so we decided it was best not to start yet. That being said, we did begin to brainstorm. Emily is a very creative thinker, and she quickly got the ball rolling with ideas. This gave me a lot of confidence.

Once we got back from Spring break, unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) there was only a week before we embarked on our trip to Ottawa, so it still didn’t make a whole lot of sense to begin just yet. We continued to brainstorm and narrow down our ideas, as we had a lot of different ones. We knew that we wanted to make a board game of some sort. We also knew we wanted to include different aspects in to the game, such as our hobbies, that would make the game more personal.

Upon returning from Ottawa, we started to kick it in to overdrive. There was about a month until the project was due, and we had quite a lot of ground to cover. We eventually settled on our idea of a board game called “Symphony Quest”. Our game was a musically-themed board game where players would move their piece along the board (like snakes and ladders without the snakes and ladders). It was titled Symphony Quest because of the musical nature to the game. A large part of the game was about matching like terms/polynomials to different music notes. Not gonna lie, this was quite confusing at first when Emily pitched the idea to me, but I soon came to realize it was quite a clever idea.

My job was to make the physical board. I had a basic idea of what I was aiming for, so I headed to Michaels to collect all the materials. I won’t go too deep in to it because it’s not very relevant to the point of this project, but needless to say, I did finish the board even though I had a few setbacks. Once I did that, I was asked to print and cut out all the cards. I was originally going to print them on card stock straight out of the printer, but my printer basically broke/ran out of ink in the process, so I was faced with yet another obstacle. I figured it out in the end though, I just printed them on regular paper at school and glued the more important cards on to card stock. The reason I only backed some of them with card stock is because I realized that as we were only presenting this game, I didn’t need to waste a bunch of card stock. I would say that the amount of work between the two of us was dissipated well. However, I’m sure Emily did more creative thinking and probably worked a little harder than me on this project due to her passion for this kind of project.

Overall, I think this project was a great learning opportunity for me because it was a change from my usual role in group/partner scenarios. I don’t usually make the artistic, physical stuff because it’s not really my niche. However during this project I was the one to do that, and it was also a change to work with a partner who is also a leader, because if I’m being honest, I think of myself as a leader when it comes to group work such as this. I’m very happy with the way this turned out and I think this unit taught me a lot.

You should definitely check out Emily’s Blog for more about this project. Also, if you would like to learn more about the game itself, you can watch the video we created, below.