Hello blog readers,

Algebra! I’ve had a lot of fun recently in math class learning all about algebra. This blogpost will just be a short and simple post about my reflection. 

The project at hand was to make a game that involved the math skills we learned. My partner, Morgan and I worked a lot on trying to think of a new game we could create but we got stumped. After a while we decided to make a game of go fish but involving algebra tiles to expand, factor, and complete the square for polynomial expressions. Personally I’m good at math but I’m not that creative so we tried to focus a bit on a theme that would be elegant but simple to get our knowledge across. 

Here is our video.

During the video you can see how to play the game and you get an understanding for algebra and using the algebra tiles and thinking strategies to solve puzzles which we also learned while making the game. The game is very simple and has two levels so you can move a level up if your strong in math. We tried to keep the points system clear and make sure all the game pieces were tidy. Now that you know the game, our video, and my thoughts of everything, I still need to tell you the most important factor, the math!

To explain all the math and critical competency I’ve learned throughout this unit I made this mind map

Curricular Competencies

We were also evaluated on curricular competencies with this project. While creating the game design I feel like we used the “thinking creatively and used curiosity and wonder when exploring problems”. I had to think a lot about every aspect of the game and how it will work. 

We also made the video above and for that we learned to “use mistakes as opportunities to advance learning”. I made the video and while editing it I realized our clips don’t make sense. We retook a bunch of shots and with that I was able to re-edit the video so I used my mistakes as opportunities to keep learning.

Another curricular competency that I used was “ explaining and justifying mathematical ideas.” We made a clear points system and easy winning conditions for the game and we made sure that the mathematical vocabulary was used properly and effectively.