Never Underestimate the Power of The Dork Side

For every six-week grading period at my school, my math teacher assigns us a project. These have included poems about the quadratic formula and secret messages decoded through simplifying equations. And for this grading period, we were assigned to make a game about logarithms with a partner.

Now, I am very fortunate that a good friend of mine from my Nerd Herd is in that class with me, and we got together to make this game. After much observation of our teacher for the past semester, we learned that she is quite the Star Wars fan. And in no way trying to appeal to her interests with the hopes that she'd appreciate our creativity, we decided we would make a Star Wars themed board game about logarithms.

This proved to be more ridiculous than we imagined.

We started with our cards. There are three types--the Yoda Asks cards, the Fortuitous Cards, and the Final Battle Cards. The Yoda Asks cards were where we addressed all of the math concepts, and the other two types of cards were to add an element of chance to the game to make it more engaging.

We then set off to create the directions for the game, which simply brought us to the conclusion that if our game wasn't about logarithms and exponents, it could actually be incredibly appealing. That is not to say that logarithms are not entertaining, but I think an entire game based around them is rather daunting.

We then were able to start on the fun stuff, like making our board and the character pieces. This is what everything ended up looking like:

These are the contents of the game, color coded and all!

Logarithms and Exponents in Space. This is the outside of our box.

The math pieces and directions, both infused with Star Wars trivia and quotes.

Our groovy Millennium Falcon game board.

And finally, our awesome character pieces. 

I had a lot of fun with this project, and I'm beginning to appreciate why my math teacher has us do these projects. They all require us to blend math concepts with art and writing. This process helps to strengthen our grasp on the math portion because one cannot successfully create a game about logarithms if one does not understand how logarithms work. 

And I'll try to remind myself of this when I come home complaining the next time she assigns one of these six-weeks projects.