For my first project in Scimatics 8 we were learning about Plate Tectonics, the driving question for this was “How does the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates cause observable changes and effects?” During this project we all learned about Tectonic plates, how they work, what they do, and then we went in groups of 2 or 3 to make our own board games that has the theory of Plate Tectonics included in them.
Before this project I had no idea what Tectonic plates were and had never even heard of them so I definitely have learned a lot throughout the project so now I could even explain to someone else what they are and what they do. The most interesting part about tectonic plates for me was learning about the different plate boundary’s because I thought it was interesting how plates interacting with other plates caused mountains, volcanoes, trenches, and other things like that. Im also happy that I learned about all the different layers of the Earth in the correct order and what they are made of.
After we all learned about Tectonic plates from reading textbooks and writing stuff down on papers, we went into groups of 2 to make a board game with evidence of the theory of tectonic plates. There was no specific way we had to make it, it could be a card game, it could be a board with game pieces, it could be both it just had to have tectonic plates included. I was sick for the beginning of making our board games so when I was feeling better I joined a group and helped them make all of their cards and board that they were going to use and they came up with the idea of their game, the probability for the cards and dice rolls, the game rules, and they made some stuff for the physical game.
The game was on a board with tile squares going around the outside of the board to the centre so you and the other people you were playing with had to role a die to move on the squares. Each square had something on them so you could land on one that says evidence card, mountain, lava, earthquake, tsunami, or you might land on a square that is plain which means you don’t have to do anything. If you land on an evidence card then you get to pick one up from the pile but you have to answer a question about tectonic plates to get to keep it, if you answer right then each evidence card will help you if you land on a specific disaster square. Lastly, on your fifth turn you get a free evidence card.
Once we all finished our games we had a game day where for the whole class we went around trying other groups games and hosting our own but we also did it with another class that was doing the same project. I got to help my group host our game to 2 other groups and me and my group got to play 2 other groups games which I found both very interesting and they both were very unique.
The very first thing we did in this project was to make a mind map to write down questions and some stuff we knew about tectonic plates on a MindNode. I mostly just wrote down questions because I barely knew anything about them. Once we did that, we didn’t touch it until the very end where we answered all the questions we had and added down some more knowledge we had and this is how mine turned out in the end with almost all my knowledge of tectonic plates.
