Hi everyone I’m back with my very first Scimatics blog post! For this project our driving question was: How does the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates cause observable changes and effects? I think I improved my understanding of this question by reading the texts books to help me learn about Earth’s tectonic plates. I also now know why Earthquakes, Volcanos etc… are caused. Throughout this project I worked with one other person and her name is Keira, her blog will be linked below. For this project we created a game, my partner and I decided to create a board game but I’ll talk more about it later in the post. The things we were evaluated on were the curricular competencies; Evaluating, Questioning and predicting, Understanding and solving.

Evaluating: Demonstrate an understanding and appreciation of evidence

At first for this competency my partner and I started off accomplished but really close to extending we just needed a little bit stronger of a connection between science concepts and evidence so, we revised. We added a few more pieces of evidence and then, we had some insightful game rules. Another part of this competency was having a least 10 key science concepts and we exceeded by writing 15. The final piece of criteria for this competency was that our game pieces should visually represent tectonics concepts and I think we extended in that because we had so many pieces that represented tectonics concepts for example all of our character pieces related to things we learned in the text books.

 

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

The criteria for this competency was that I use need to use my time efficiently in class. I found that I barely ever needed to bring home my work because, in class I’m always on task and focus and I create authentic work with the time I have. I get my work done because I have good work ethics and that is very helpful for me when doing a project because I can plan out when and what I need to do. For example when me and my partner were creating our physical game board we each had separate jobs to do, we were organized (I made the board and she wrote a lot of the cards) but then we always checked in with each other to make the other was ok with what we were doing so we still got the teamwork experience from the project.

 

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

This was the last competency I was evaluated on and it’s criteria was that our tectonics game uses several examples of probability to determine outcomes and is clearly stated in the game rules. I think I extended in this because in the game rules you can clearly see where the probability examples are because their labeled under Probabilities. I also think I showed some exemplary examples and I think the examples really fit well with the game.

 

Overall this project was really fun to do I really enjoyed making a board game and I learned a lot which is a plus.

Here’s Keira’s blog: I think this is a blog???

At the Launch of this project I created a MindNode with my questions and things I already know about tectonics plates. Here it is:

This is our game board:

 

 

 

These are our game rules: 

Thanks for reading -Sydney🙃