Month: May 2023

Nation Sensation

Helloooooo Internet!

I’m back and I’m writing a post about a little project called building a nation. This project was all about learning what nationalism and what a nation is. So we had to have a driving question to go along with this project and that was, “ What did/does nationalism mean to the people around canada?” Now we know the big question let’s get on to the post.

The first thing we did was a simulation of confederation and the build up to it. We got assigned groups and picked a colony that we wanted to be, my group went with New Brunswick. We were given folders with information that told us about our opinions and information and what resources we had and needed. Based off this information we had to decide whether joining the confederation would be beneficial to us or if we would lose more that we would gain. New Brunswick was really weak and was mostly only good for lumber and some fish. We were also very open to attacks from America and had little to no military power. We also needed grain so we could have more food options and a balanced diet. So this was a no-brainer as we had much to gain and little to lose. 

We ended up joining the confederation and settling on laws that were agreed upon by all.

So we had finished the simulation and it was now revealed that we were going to make a board game for the end product of this project, this was a very cool idea and it sounded really fun but of course this is school work so there was a small downside, we had to incorporate nationalism and make the game based around confederation. This wouldn’t be much of a challenge for most people, buuuuuut I’m from England and I know absolutely nothing when it comes to Canadian history. Luckily my partner knew a lot and I had this little thing called google that was going to help me out, but of course you know about google because you are probably using right now to view this post. 

We now had to come up with an idea for what we would do, there were a lot of options but we decided on a trivia style game, similar to trivial pursuit. We modified the questions to be five new categories with two different styles, there were indigenous questions about the Wendat and Algonquian nations. The categories were economics politics and history, and there was also French and English questions, with the categories of political and transportation. This was fine and dandy but if our game was real there would be a lawsuit for copyright reasons, so we needed to make a change and that was adding raiding. In order to make the game more original and to enhance the nationalism aspect we decided that on every card one question was selected to have a raid symbol, if you answer it right you get to destroy a piece obtained by your opponent.

We had the idea but before we make it we needed rules for the game, this was done by my partner so go check out his blog at blog44.ca/callumr 

We now needed to construct the game which was a huuuuge pain because originally we were going to make 60 cards each. This didn’t seem possible in 9 days so we cut it to 30 each and then cut it to 30 for him and 20 for me this still made 10 cards which was reasonable, after we made the cards I made the boards and then we brought in game prices and the dice and boom the game was finished.

Now we go back to the driving question” What does/did nationalism mean to the people of Canada?” 

The answer is it’s what it means to be a Canadian but not just that, it means striving for the country that you love, it’s embracing who you are and where you come from. 

Thanks for reading my post I know this was super wordy an I apologize for that but I hope you have a good day and bubye 👋👋👋👋