Hey y’all, Max here
My experience with math and science has never been great. these were always the subjects that I struggled with, and always the ones I never completely understood. I think this project really opened my eyes to that, and gave me a look at what the standards of this subject really are. It also helped me understand how exactly I can succeed and find strength in my worst areas of proficiency.
The first milestone that even slightly helped me was milestone 2, which where we thought of different vocabulary that could appear in our game, ( most of which eventually did ) and would also be used as key concepts. This milestone allowed me to brainstorm some helpful terms, that would play bigger roles later on.
Unlike milestone 2, I believe that there were some milestones that didn’t really help, specifically milestones 1 ( Game rules first attempt ) and milestones 3( Plate tectonics test ). Milestone 1 wasn’t so useful, because I already had an idea of what I was going to do at the beginning of the project. Milestone 3 reminded me of how much progress I was making in terms of my knowledge of tectonic plates, but none of the results were really much of a surprise. I was aware of my knowledge of tectonic plates the whole project, and milestone 3 didn’t really show me anything amazing, or unbelievable.
These are some of my Khan Academy quiz results.
While I previously said earlier that milestones 1 and 3 weren’t much help, they weren’t all completely useless. For example, I said milestone 1 wasn’t very helpful because I already had an idea of what I was going to do for the game, but I did get some more ideas out of milestone 1, that I probably wouldn’t have thought of if it wasn’t for this milestone.
And Milestone 3. I said that I already knew how much I knew about tectonic plates, but milestone 3 made me realize that I wasn’t getting every question right, and that knowledge encouraged me to try harder, and make sure I got a near-perfect score, or at least a decent score.
Making the final game rules was not an easy process. My partner and I discovered halfway through making our final product that this was not going to be a short game to play, nor was it going to be easy to understand, which were two important things on the criteria. This brings us to milestone numbers 3 and 4, ( Final game rules, Complete game ) likely the most important milestones. While they didn’t exactly help us, they most certainly encouraged us to finish the important parts up by the time we reached them in the creation process. As I said earlier, our game was not easy to play originally, and thus began the process of simplifying the game.
This process took up a lot of valuable class time, and also time to work at home, which may have been even more valuable than class time in the long run. I think the period of time spent
Dumbing the game down was very helpful, and probably saved the game from being too complicated for the average person to sit don and play.
Now, at this point we are probably almost done this project, and we are ready to get this done with. the process of creating this game has been exhausting mentally and physically, requiring us to work long hours, and stay up late at night perfecting what we think is an overly-complicated game. We still believe that this project is a success, but the journey to get where we are now has been fatiguing.
The entire duration of this whole project, there have been curricular competencies.
These competencies have guided us throughout each milestone, and these milestones are evidence of our learning, and our following of these competencies.
Questioning and predicting: Demonstrate a sustained intellectual curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest.
Milestones 1 and 2 best show this. Those are the milestones that show where I got some of my original ideas, and for most of the later development, more so in the later development. We eventually had to scrap a lot of our original ideas, because most of them didn’t follow some of our later design ideas.
Evaluating: Demonstrate an understanding and appreciation of evidence.
Milestones 5 and 6 are good examples of this. Especially milestone 6, which is a complete game. This is kind of obvious why, because to make a complete game you have to take feedback, opinions, and you also have to take the criteria into account. When you’ve tried something, you always need to improve upon it.
Applying and innovating: Contribute to care for self, others, community, and world through personal or collaborative approaches.
This is our finished final game board, which we spent far too much time designing, and perfecting.
( We made this map with Inkarnate )
This is definitely shown through milestones 6 ( A complete game ). I think that I worked well with my partner, and we helped each other work through the project. Admittedly there were times when we lost track of our work, and we did get off-topic some times, but that didn’t stop us from eventually coming together to finish this project.
Before we start a project, we always have a driving question. this time, the driving question was:
How are mathematical and thematical concepts used in game design?
This question has been the question behind this entire project, and I think that after my experience with this board game, I can properly and accurately answer the driving question.
Before this, whenever I played a board game, it was always just a board game. But now that I’ve completed this project, I look at board games, and games in general differently. I think that I can see now that there are plenty of difficult calculations, math, and formulas that go into games that require the player to have even the smallest amount of skill, and there is even math in games that don’t require skill.
So my answer to the driving question is this: math is always in games. Whether its predicting a card draw, or deciding what a dice roll does, math, and calculations will decide it.
This has been my tectonic plate reflection. I had fun with most parts of this project, and it was definitely a challenge for me. I hope we have more projects like this, albeit with some minor changes.