Students Take Educational Games to the Next Level
The assignment may sound boring, but creating an educational board game turned out to be anything but for Design Thinking 8 students.
They had to go back to the drawing board more than once and seek input from their teachers, but the fun was evident when they tested their inventions on their classmates.
The Assignment:
Design Thinking 8 students were tasked with interviewing teachers and students to identify what students could use the most help with in their classes. Then they brainstormed games that they could make to help teach those tricky subjects. Once the idea was born, they had to bring it to life with a playable model.
“They did a great job,” said Brendan Hoyle, Design Thinking 8 teacher. “I especially appreciated Mike H. ’27, Jacob M. ’27, Bethuel T. ’27 and Henri M.’s ’27 game that progresses from Kindergarten through graduation with math questions increasing in difficulty as you progress. Their game also starts brightly colored and loses color as it gets more bleak.”
The game is called “Math: Story of My Life” and “it’s all math, so it starts off easy, like 9*5,” said co-creator Mike H. “I always thought elementary school was a bit more fun than middle school and then high school is a little worse,” said Mike, so the team reflected these sentiments in the game, which starts off easy and is bright, but gets more difficult and loses color.
Middle school students were asked to play the games and provide feedback to their creators.
Hannah C. ’28 loved “Math: Story of My Life.” “It's really good and really fun,” she said. It’s like ‘Risk’ but you don’t take anything over."
“Then students had to make adjustments to the educational aspects of the games as well as the play mechanics based on their observations and feedback,” said Hoyle.
To learn more about the project, contact Brendan Hoyle at bhoyle@norfolkcollegiate.org.
