For this assignment we needed to answer the question: “How are thematic and mathematical elements used in game design?”. We had to this by create a game all about tectonic plates and there side effects and the natural disasters they cause.

For the first step in this project we created a mind map about all the things we already knew about tectonic plates and the the natural disasters they cause (Tsunami, Earthquakes, etc). We also needed to add questions that we would later answer at the end of the assignment with the help of what we had learned with the help of worksheets and textbook pages.

 

This is my final mind map with all of the things I knew and had learned throughout the course of this project. I had already know the basic of tectonic plates like they make mountains and earthquakes happen, what I didn’t know was how they did actually made these disasters happen and how they moved. What I later found out was the different types of plate movements with the help of the the text book pages that we studied and the filled out a worksheet on.

The text book pages held a lot of information and were almost like the fuel to most of our projects information. It helped us create our games and learn the different concepts that we needed to include in our game. They also helped us with different game ideas surrounding the whole concept, at least for my for my group anyways.

We then did some Khan Academy quizzes  on some of the subjects we had been learning about in class. These were simple little quizzes and  were just a few questions long (10-12) and where mainly focused on earthquakes and volcanos. The first quiz was about tectonic plates, the second was focus on volcanoes, and the third was focused on earthquakes.

We then started to work on our game, but first we need to establish some game rules. First me and my partner started by thinking of what sort of game we wanted to create and settled on a candy like etc game barked with different stops along the way. Each stop made you pick up a card that had a side effect of a different type of plate boundary that the stop had. Theses card consisted of 4 different side effects – Tsunami, Earthquake, Volcano, and Mountain. Depending on which card you picked up you would either skip a turn, go to medic (start), go forward or go backwards.

 

Next we started working on the rules, we wanted them to be simple to read yet very informational about the game and the science concepts we had been learning about. So we started to create a document that you would call the instruction manual for our game, in included the game setup, game rules, game pieces, game objective, and the probability used in the game.

Next we started to actually create you game pieces, we started by creating the little player pieces, these were pretty simple to make. Next we started make the cards, these were a little harder to create seeing as though we didn’t want them to be to thick because of the card board. Then we finally started to create the game board, this was probably the most difficult part of the create it process because the paper wasn’t working for the actually pathway but we ended up coming up with a solution that would work. In the end this was probably my favourite part of the entire project because I really like to create and build things like this.

In the end I think that all of the information I used in the project helped me answer the drawing question. This is my answer:They are used to give components to the game making it a much more fun and educational experience.

Thank you for reading,

Ines