Hello people and welcome back to the blog that you didn’t ask for but got anyway(and totally enjoy)! Today, we will be going over the first project we have done in our PLP 9 year, a Scimatics project about exponent laws. In this project, we were tasked with creating a card game that used exponent laws to play the game. Our driving question was, ‘How does math make games more interesting, complex, and replay-able?’
For our launch activity, we made 3 games with dice, of increasing complexity. This was meant to spark our ideas about math in games and how we could make a fun game. This leads me into the next thing that we did. We then made a mind map of math in games. This is mine.
Over the next few weeks, we learned about exponents, exponent laws and how they work. Most of this we learned through some pretty boring worksheets that I won’t talk about to much.
Okay. Let’s get into the creation and refinery of our game. We started with very little ideas and no idea where we wanted to go with our game. The people I worked with were Carter, and Noah. Our first game rules draft was very rough and we did not have a lot. Our main idea was to have a original map that four people used armies to claim land on. As we developed our game we added dice rolls into the game. The main thing they were used for were for numbers in exponent laws and equation. One example of this was the way that you claimed resources in the game. You could use these resources to upgrade your armies and you gained resources by rolling 2 D10’s(ten sided die) and using one number for the base and one for the exponent. One of the numbers you can roll on a D10 is a 0, so if you you rolled a 0 exponent than that law(if an exponent is 0, the answer is 1) would come into play. The full rules can be viewed here.
What that I think was most important thing I learned from this project was exponents. This is important because the next time I go to the grocery store and ask an employee how much something costs, and they respond, ‘57 to the power of -2 times 57 to the power of 13 divided by ((-3) to the power of 3)to the power of 3,’ I will know that the answer is 137.485925810803. I think that overall in this project I did okay. I met all the criteria with the game pretty well and I did the work sheets fairly accurately as well. I think the most lacking part of my project is the complexity of our game. It is pretty hard to understand without someone there to explain it. Now that I have gone over the majority of this project, it’s time to talk about the curricular competencies.
Reasoning and Analyzing: Use logic and patterns to solve puzzles and play games.
A clear and simple points system and win conditions for the game are carefully designed.
This was probably the curricular competency that I did the worst on. I had a very confusing game that was quite difficult to understand. Although points systems and win conditions were fairly clear, the rest of the game was not. I think if I were to do this again than would make a very different and a lot less complex game.
Communicating and Representing: Represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial, and symbolic forms.
A set of clear, complete, interesting and personalized instructions are created for how each player takes their turn. Examples are included. The game design uses at least 4 different exponent laws and using these laws is integrated into each player’s turn.
Most of this competency was demonstrated through our cards. Most of our cards did things that involved exponent laws. We had one that was part of every turn but most of them were in the cards. If I were to do this again, I would make it very differently and definitely include more exponent rules in each turn.
Applying and Innovating: Contribute to care for self, others, community, and world through individual or collaborative approaches.
All class time is used efficiently for learning without distractions. All group members contribute equally.
I think that I did this pretty well. I was attentive through all of the classes. I think that this is partly due to me enjoying exponents and how they work. One of my favourite parts about exponents is that you can write equations using exponents that look like how they write complicated equations in movies. If I were to do this again I would spend more time working on our game in class so that we had less homework.
Thank you all a lot for sitting through my ramble. I look forward to seeing you in blog posts through the year, and I think that this blog post was a pretty good answer to the question, ‘how does math make games more interesting, complex, and re-playable?’
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