So you thought that I would do all those posts about disruption and not talk about the stuff we did in math too?

So this is the unit of polynomials. I’ve always felt pretty comfortable with this branch of math so I felt pretty comfortable coming into the unit. The one thing I didn’t like too much about doing polynomials last year was algebra tiles. Oh algebra tiles…

I don’t have too much of a problem with algebra tiles as I know they help some people out. The problem for me, I’m not some people. I honestly think it makes things more complicated, so I was hoping that for grade 10, we wouldn’t be doing as much of that. Oh boy, was I wrong…

So we started off our polynomials unit by doing a pretty basic recap of the things we learned last year, nothing new. We then moved on to increasingly difficult equations and concepts for polynomials. Our work at this point in time kind of looked like this…

There’s not too much to say about the math that I can talk about. What I want to talk about, is the project! So, like every unit, we were given a project near the beginning of our unit which we could be working on and adding upon as we went about our unit. The project in this case, was to create a board game that focused on algebra tiles. Although I was thinking, “Oh great, algebra tiles…” I was also thinking, “Oh great! Algebra tiles!” The reason I was so 50/50 about it is that although I’m not too fond of algebra tiles, there’s A LOT you can do to make an interesting game using the concepts we learned in our unit along with algebra tiles.

I partnered up with Calum and we got to work right away as Calum is really good for the math aspect and I was really good with the creative aspect. Even when I say that I’m in charge of the creative portion of our project, it wasn’t to say that I immediately knew what I wanted to do. In fact, we ended up spending a lot of time thinking and not doing. We were originally set on some kind of game that involved a deck of cards. The thing is, there was a very specific rubric we had to follow when creating our game idea and one of the more important things was making sure that our game was a game of chance. That’s a little bit of an over exaggeration, it only had to have an element of chance. Here’s the rubric so you can see what kind of game we had to make!

Either way, we ditched our cards ideas as we were stuck on just remodelling card games and making them “math-ish.” That wasn’t going to work but we really liked having cards in our game so we went with a different approach. We eventually came up with our rules and were ready to start building our physical board game!

Building our game was actually fairly simple. We cut out some stiff canvas to make our game board and painted on it to make the spots on the board. We then made our “Equation Cards”— which you’ll learn about later— out of different coloured pieces of paper, and we created our algebra tiles out of cut-out pieces of balsa wood which were red (negative) on one side, and blue (positive) on the other side. Here’s what our game board with the pieces looked like!

So we created our game! The problem was, it wasn’t all that personal. We made a pretty interesting game with some pretty non-personalized elements. To overcome that lack of self, I decided to create a cool little commercial that would explain every single aspect of our game while still remaining fun and informative. Check it out!

So how did I create this video? This one was a little different as I was trying to make it look like an infomercial for our game. To do that, I found a clip of a TV flipping through channels. I then edited it so that when the channel changed, it looked like it was changing to our commercial. I put a lot of thought into how the beginning would look like too as this would be the most important part of making it seem like a commercial. Like lots of infomercials, I addressed a problem and talked about how our product is the perfect solution for it. Afterwards, everything fell into place; I talked about the rules of the game, the scoring system, how to play, etc. I then ended it off with the same “channel flipping” clip I had and made it look like the channel changed again at the end of the video.
Like all of my projects, I did this on IMovie

In the end, I’m really happy with how this video turned out. It’s definitely one of the videos I’m more proud of as it definitely takes a more creative path compared to some of the other work I’ve done in the past. Although I’m still not too fond of algebra tiles, this unit has taught me that sometimes, you just need to suck it up and work with what you’ve got. I really like being able to personalize projects like this and I hope that I continue to do that in the future but until then, thanks for checking out this post!