Hello and welcome back to my blog! This is my first ever blog post for scimatics. This first project was about tectonic plates and probability, and how we incorporated these into making a board game. Now before making our board games, we were going to have to learn a lot about tectonic plates. 

So way back at the start of the project, we did a fun experiment to duplicate mantle convection in the earths crust. We had red coloured water that was warm and we had blue coloured water which was cold. We followed precise steps to see what would happen when we put them together or mixed them up. The warm water rises and the cold water sinks, because the cold water is denser that the hot water. It looked like this:

We also read textbook pages to learn more about tectonic plates, the theory of plate tectonics, how they form and what can happen when two plates collide. With our gathered information, we thought of ten scientific vocabulary terms from the textbook pages, and tried to think of how they could be used in a board game. 

 

We shared our vocabulary with a partner to combine ideas and brainstorm board game ideas together. It was interesting seeing what your partner had come up with, since we had really different tectonic plate game idea. Our first attempt in the game rules was not great. The game would have been super hard to understand if we hadn’t made some tweaks and changes to eliminate some elements of our game. With an initial set of game rules, we started building our game pieces.

Here are some of our games pieces:

We worked on several  curricular competencies for this project including evaluating, questioning  and predicting and understanding and solving.

Evaluating: Demonstrate an understanding and appreciation of evidence

So for this competency, we tried to include and describe 10 key science concepts in our games. My group was able to include about 6 concepts into our game. I wish we could have got at least 10, but we never counted how many words we had until when we received feedback and our assessment from Mr.Harris. Our game board was inspired by the ring of fire, but we created a trail of volcanic islands. Another example of how we used tectonic plate evidence was that we made draw cards with these scientific terms: slab pull, mid ocean ridge, deep ocean trench, subduction and magma.

Questioning and predicting: Demonstrate a sustained intellectual curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest.

I used all my class time efficiently. I was focused on getting our games rules precise and simple. I started making our game cards and game board. Although I tried reminding my teammates sometimes, I couldn’t really control if they were helping all the time too. Our team reminded each other to bring supplies  ( cardboard, card stock, markers, dice) by texting each other before class. 

Understanding and solving: Develop, demonstrate, and apply mathematical understanding through play, inquiry, and problem solving

Another instruction for creating our tectonic plates games was that they had to involve probability. Now, most games do use probability. Games use probability to determine the odds of getting a specific card or rolling a specific number for example. In our game, the players roll dice and aim for a specific combination or number to collect victory points.

My favourite part of this project was definitely going to try out other people’s game inventions on game day. Honestly, there were some really good ideas and some games had a solid, real world feel to them. The games were fun to play. I wish we could’ve had a bit more time to have a chance to try out more people’s games. 

At the very beginning of this project, we made a Mind Map to organize our thoughts, questions and existing knowledge on tectonic plates. We were asked to revise  and add to our existing  mind map at the end of the project. This was a nice way to organize some key points and answer some of my questions from before. Here is mine:

Now if you read this far, I want to congratulate you. To wrap up this blog post, I’m going to answer our driving question for this project; How are thematic and mathematical elements used in game design?

If you look at the board games around you, they most likely have a theme and involve probability in some way. A board game usually has a central theme. The theme for our game was tectonic plates, so we created a game using scientific terms and concepts related to our theme. Mathematical elements used in game design is mostly probability, which helps determine the outcomes of turns and maybe even of the end of the game. We designed our games by staying central to our theme of tectonic plate movement and by including probability.

Thanks so much for reading my first scimatics blog post!

Make sure to check out my teammates blogs; Kira and Caitlin.