( the game design )

 This summative blog post is about the project I’ve been doing over the past two weeks, called plate tectonics. The main point of this project was to show my complete understanding of what plate tectonics are and incorporated that knowledge into a creative game design. To get to this point of my knowledge I worked on multiple stepping stones that lead on to five milestones. The key stepping stone I would like to highlight is the 4.1 workbook and textbook . The reason I would like to acknowledge this stepping stone is because it gave me lots of ideas for what I would use for my final project (milestone 5). The 4.1 workbook had lots of keys science concepts such as different plate boundary’s, layers of the earth and so much more.  

  The three milestones I want to give information about are milestone 4, 5, and 6. To start of explaining the journey throughout these three milestones I’ll explain what milestones 4 was all about. In milestone four me and my partner, for this project, came up will rules and a concept for this game. It took a lot of thinking but we finally came up with great rules to guide players to be involved with this game. In milestone five ‘Complete Game’ I improved concepts of the game. The main thing that I focused on was incorporating probability into the game. To meet the expectation of this I did a probability work sheet that helped me with my knowledge of how probability works.( I do realize that I didn’t get every question right, but that made me learn from my mistakes ). Now moving to the last milestone I would like to share milestones 6. For this milestone I shared the game to a few of my peers. I showed the complete game to them and they gave me some feedback on my game. This feedback was very helpful because it gave a outline of what I could have improved on. The last point I would like to state for this milestone is that I went to my peers game a gave them constructive feedback that probably helped them get to a good point in their idea of what they would need to improve on. Lastly, to get a good sense of what I learned throughout this project I made a mind map. this mind map shows how I improved my knowledge about key science concepts about tectonic plates.

To achieve these milestones I used three curricular competencies:

 Questioning and predicting: The way I incorporated this skill into my learning is by having a demonstrating a analytical understanding of a scientific topic or problem of personal interest. The point in this project where I showed this skill was in a milestone where I had to demonstrate my learning of vocabulary for science terms. This curricular competency really helped my in my overall game.

 Understanding and solving: the way I used this skill into my learning was by showing my ability to develop and solve a problem. The point in this project that I really used this curricular competency is in the milestone 4. In this milestone I really took on the idea of problem solving because I demonstrated clear instructions to solve problems in a design, such as how to solve questions related to probability. That’s how I incorporated that ‘understanding and solving’ into my learning throughout this project.

 Evaluating: how I incorporated this curricular competency into my game design is by showing an understanding of what I’m learning and giving a piece of evidence to support the understanding. The milestone I used this curricular competency is milestone 2. I show a understanding of my evidence because I wrote science vocabulary that I previously learned and gave my understanding of these science vocabulary terms by creating evidence. That’s how I used ‘Evaluating’ in my learning through this project.

Lastly, the driving question that this project helped answer:

How are thematic and mathematical elements used in game design?

 The answer for this question can be stated in many ways. In my opinion I think mathematical elements can be incorporated into game designs because they make up the game. They build up the game because multiple things are hanging on to the idea of probability, fractions and more. You have to build these concepts to a thematic point were they get a start and from this start you can have different ideas that keep adding up to that point. That’s how I think thematic and mathematical elements are used in game design. 

Happy Holidays,

Alicia 😀

Check out my partner for this project, Ella, she contributed with lots of idea’s a lot in this project!