It has been so long since I designed a game for my students and I've really missed it. This game in particular was difficult to design because I have no one to play test it with. This means that I have no idea if this game works or if it's even fun.
I am teaching Precalculus this year. I haven't taught this course in quite a few years, so I'm excited about teaching new material and creating games for the topics. If my memory serves me, some students had difficultly "seeing" the opposite and adjacent sides of a right triangle. So, I thought a game that would reinforce this was long overdue. Let's just dig in...
The only thing I have made a decision on is the main mechanic of the game and that it's a farming theme. There are two right triangles as shown below, with a face up pile of crops on each side.
On a player's turn, he would use a trig function to gather crops. For example, if I were to play Sin(x), I would get the blueberry and the corn since they are opposite and hypotenuse. My problem is why are they collecting crops and why are some crops more desirable than others on a given turn?
**I want all crops to be valuable all the time, but some crops are more desirable on a certain round and other crops on other rounds.
The players are taking turns collecting crops, or I suppose they are harvesting the crops. I've had a few ideas about game play but it just doesn't feel quite right yet.
First Idea:
I create order cards that the students need to fulfill in order to get points/money in the game.
The problem was that it wasn't too often that the students would have crops available that they needed. Each turn just felt like harvesting crops willy nilly based on the trig functions and angles available.
Possible fixes:
- decrease the number of different crops
- don't have trig cards. Allow the students to use any trig function and angle they want on their turn (my concern is that this will become an obvious choice and not lead to meaningful choice)
Second Idea:
Make this a cooperative game. Perhaps the students all own a farm together and they need to generate enough money to keep their operation going. If they generate enough money by the end of the growing season, they win.
Third Idea:
Let's get together after the pandemic and flesh this out together!
Art Credits:
Been thinking. Love the idea, and I think you're right to keep the cool mechanic.
ReplyDeleteHow might they get the trig cards? Could they spend some of the produce they get to pick up trig cards from a triangle? Maybe two triangles, one for picking up a trig card and one for harvesting crops? Making it a kind of rummy. Like lay down opposite and adjacent and pick up a tangent or a cotangent. The win condition for something like this could be getting 5 of a single crop.
Might be simplest as a pick up two every turn, then score like Sushi Go. Most with a crop 5 points, 2nd 3 points, 3rd 1 point.
Or, more complex, make the different crops score differently.
What about negative cards? Weeds, underripe, bugs, pesticide...
Cutesy idea: trig cards could be names of farmers/workers.
playingcards.io would be another way to test.