The Board game project was a group project for my 11th grade Technical Reading and Writing class. Working with four other students, we had to create a board game that would help our client teacher fulfill a specific teaching goal. The teacher that my group was assigned to was Ms. McKnight, a middle school math teacher. She requested that we construct a board game that helped her students understand how to manipulate negative integers and could be mass produced very cheaply.

 

We started by brainstorming possible ideas of how to make our board game unique while still being able to make a minimum of ten copies of the board game for our teacher to use in class. Eventually, we decided to make ours on manila folders so that the board would hold all of the pieces and would not require any new materials. The board game also was created on the computer so that we could give our client-teacher a digital copy of all the parts so that she could print some more copies if she wanted to. We also completed a series of usability tests that tested both the general concept of the game and then the fine details of how well the game played and how well the instructions worked.

 

The qualities that were shown the most during this project were creativity and collaboration. As you can see in the artifact picture, the board games where designed on the computer, then were printed onto folders. At the beginning of this project, we had no idea of how we were going to mass produce our game board quickly and effectively. By being creative, we were able to come up with the idea to laminate the game board directly onto the folder that would hold the game and also came up with the idea to make the cards and game board’s design on the computer so that the teacher could print as many copies as she wanted. The process actually came together as a result of the efforts of all members in my group which leads into the quality of collaboration. One problem we did have was choosing the actual design of the game, so eventually we all had to compromise to be able to produce the game the way that we did. Compromising is the stereotypical answer to “What does it mean to collaborate?” and this is the first project that I have done with a group that actually had a decent amount of conflict, as compared to projects like the cookbook where we all were thinking along the same lines.

 

The most important thing that I learned over the duration of this project is that something as simple as a board game still has a ridiculously large amount of work put into creating it. Even the questioni cards, the most simple piece of the game, still took forever to make becuase I first had to go through and choose some questions, answer the questions, and then format the question cards just to be able to produce one card and since we needed at least 60, it took me a full two weeks to be able to produce them all! (Never doing that again...)