Ideation - Week 5

Ideation week continues, and this time we created a short list of 10 great game themes that we could use and then put them to the test during our 'Speed-Ideating' Challenge. We categories the games we have been playing into 4 broad categories: Board, Card, Team Based & Combination. These types were stuck up across our space.

 

We used our list of ten ideas and these different game types to create mini on-the-spot pitches for what that game might be like. This allowed us the freedom to explore many different ideas, most of which won't get past this point, but the ones we settle on will be stronger for it. 

Ideation in Action

Another Amazing Week in Team Awesome

This week has flown by .... and we've done lots of new and interesting things ....on Tuesday we looked at working together successfully by doing some team building activities like knots, caterpillar traverse and electric amoeba.

The same afternoon the Year 8 students went to an informative presentation by Newlands College. While they were away the Year 7 students from Mahi Ako came to play games with Team Awesome ...it was fun watching our students share their favourite games with the visitors

 The highlight of the week came with a visitor on Thursday. Shem is a game designer and publisher and he came to share his journey with the students. They were surprised to learn that over a 12 year period he has produced 7 games - and that each game can take up to 9 months to create. 

After listening to Shem we worked in groups to come up with a 100 ideas for possible game themes.

Maths in Team Awesome

Students have been hard at work during Maths time learning about fractions, decimals and percentages.

Game Development - Quickfire Challenge

On Monday we started a Quickfire Game design challenge to get us thinking about the steps involved in creating our own games. We started off by creating a basic 'roll-and-move" game, similar to games like Snakes & Ladders, Cluedo & Monopoly, however our games took this idea one step further by adding in some elements of player choice. 



After one block of ideation and design, students playtested their own ideas before sharing their game with another group. This allowed us to give feedback on other people's work as we worked our way through our game criteria:
- Does this game have clear rules? 
- What are the player's goals?
- What choices do players make? 



This gave us some hands-on experience developing our ideas and giving feedback which we will be able to use when we start our main game development. 

Cross Country

A massive congratulations to all of Team AWESOME for taking part in the cross country today with such energy and enthusiasm! We were all so proud to see you out there, doing your best. Congratulations everyone! 

Reading Week 2 Term 2

This term for reading, we are looking at 'what good readers do'. We are learning the skills below and using them to support our understanding of what we read. 

Some of the many activities we will be completing over the next few weeks include: 

- Interpreting sophisticated picture books and making connections with the world around us.

- Using 'Socratic Smackdown' which is a discussion based activity with points awarded for agreeing and disagreeing, 2 points for asking questions and for using evidence. Our focus is reading game reviews and then discussing the merits of each article. 

- Using the skills of preview, predict and summarise to research topics which interest us. 

- Reading and comprehending texts on a range of different topics, with the focus of building inference and comprehension skills. 

Game Development Week 2

This week for Game Development we have moved into the Synthesis phase of our inquiry. This is were we begin to connect our learning from last week (and our prior knowledge of games) to our own personal ideas.

After evaluating and analysing a number of different games throughout last week, this week we tabulated our findings and decided on which features of a game we like the best. After that, we looked at 'What makes a game a game?" and created a list of the top 10 features of a game.

Maths: Fractions Focus

Team Awesome have started the term with a focus on place value and fractions. After completing some assessments and establishing next learning steps, students have been completing tasks and participating in maths games aimed at reinforcing and refreshing their current knowledge in this area.

4/5/16 Game Development Begins!

It's Term 2 and Team Awesome has hit the ground running. On Monday we launched into the immersion phase of our game development inquiry. Before we can design our own games, we have to see what's out there already. Students have had a good time playing games, learning new games from reading rule books or explanations from others, and we have been really impressed by their engagement during these times. 

After each game, students would then have a discussion about what they enjoyed about their experience playing, what decisions they could make and the look and feel of the game pieces themselves. We have also encountered new types of games such as deck-building games like Dominion, social deduction games like Apples to Apples and hidden role games like The Resistance Avalon. 

Most of these wonderful games have been supplied to the school from the Wellington company, Board Game Rentals. They have offered us over 20 games to play in the next 4 weeks, and are helping put us in touch with some New Zealand game designers. They also sell games, so if your student really enjoys a game they play at school then you can show some support for this local-company by buying your games through them. 

Click on this link to see what games we have on loan!

Our next step is to start drawing some connections between the games that we have really enjoyed. What stands out about them? And what might turn us off about other games? Our Home Learning this week is for students to play a game at home and then answer the following questions:

- What did you enjoyed about it? 
- What did you think about how the game looks and feels?
- What players can do during the game?