Board game (Create and improve)

How it functions/rules of the game:

The way this game functions is similar to a board game called snake game, and that is were I got the inspiration to this game. For this game, players (kids) will use the figures they chose to try and get to the ending place. The number of steps they take is related to the types of questions they answered in the question cards. If they answer a question on the cards that has a number 5 written on it, they can move 5 steps toward the ending place if they got it correctly. The higher the number is on the card, the harder the question will be.

while moving on, the player will try to avoid landing on the grids that have a H written on it. The H represent a hunter, and a hunter will take away one life of your figure. Each figure represent a different type of endangered animals and have different numbers of lives. For example: The figure s Tiger represents Sumatran tiger. There are only about 400 of these tigers alive, so it has 4 lives. The P Alligator represents the Philippine alligator, which only have about 100 of them still surviving in the whole world. Players will need to answer different questions in order to avoid landing on where the hunter is.

 

My successful criteria of the educative board game is:

  • Educative
  • Fun
  • Functions well
  • Easy for kids to understand
  • Can be played multiple times
  • Enjoy with family
  • Release stress

During the improving process, I adjusted my board game by reviewing the problems I have faced during the previous prototypes to make sure it matches the successful criteria of my board game.

For the first prototype, it is just an idea of the board game. it is not very detailed, and it cannot function. Because the rules are not really clear, it also cannot be fun or educative since it cannot be played. So, in the second prototype, I focused detailedly improving and finalising the rules of the board game so that at least it is a game that can be played. I learned from the first prototype that rules are critical to a game, different rules can change the main purpose of the game. Without these restrictions, a board game won’t even function normally.

What I learned from the second prototype is that the topic of a board game is also important for its audience. In my second prototype, the topic of the board game is more about protecting the environment. I thought that kids might want to learn about the environment. But after some further more researching, I suddenly realised that the environment is a very wide topic of kids, os I decided to narrow it down. I realised that kids are often more interested in animals, and that is how I changed my focused of the board game. After that, I changed my topic/focus of the board game in to animal protection. I changed my purpose to educate kids of the situation endangered animals. Narrowing down the topic makes me know more about what types of board game I want to design and how will I make it so that it is a successful board game.

After hand drawing multiple version of prototypes, I finally laser cut my final prototype of the board game. I believed that after all the changes and adjustments I made on my previous prototypes really helped a lot on improving my board game. Because of that, I believe that my board game is a pretty successful board game according to the success criteria on the previous stage.

First of all, this board game that I made functions pretty well. Because of the adjustments of rules and playability during both prototypes (mainly first prototype), this board game now functions as well as any other board games. It has a goal to accomplish and there are challenges when players are trying to accomplish the goal/target. This is what all games must have in order to function.  The board game also functions because it can be played multiple times. The purpose of this game is to educate small kids about the situation of the endangered spices, and the questions cards is one of the most important way of educating them. Which means that as long as there are still cards that haven’t been used, the game can be played multiple times with multiple different people.

The board game is also very educative because of the rules and way that the game functions. The question cards will educate the kids about endangered spices. After knowing how pathetic these animals are, kind kids will help these animals both now and in the future when they have the ability do more things for animals. The figures will make kids get more familiar with the different endangered spices, and their situation toward extinction. These are all ways that shows how educative is this board game.

At last, in my opinion the board game also successfully achieves the goal of fun and enjoying with family. Since there is multiple figures in this game, this means that more than multiple people can play at the same time. That means this game can be played between families. Because of the game board, this game is also easy for kids to understand. The game board is similar to snake game—an easy game that doesn’t require that much of thinking. Because of that, the board game will not be hard for small kids to understand.

Reflection:

While designing this board game, I really enjoyed with the fixing my mistake with building up the next prototype. Every time when I adjusting and look at my previous prototype, I always figure out something new. Sometimes it is a idea from my self, and other times it is a inspiration from other games. I know all these ideas can improve my game, and make my thinking more wide and creative when designing. That is always the part that I did well on—-learning from the previous prototypes.

But the hard part is when I am brainstorming a game when there is not a lot of inspirations. At the beginning of the project, I didn’t really have a lot of ideas and experience about designing a game, which cost me to think a long time and came up with nothing at all. I was just thinking and thinking, but that didn’t really work out. I can’t really think of any types of board game.

I would go do more research about board games if I have one more chance of this project. That way, I will have more ideas to experiment and explore on which might give me better final product. Also, researching more on the internet will make me have more of my own ideas of designing a board game.

 

After all the work I did for this project, I am quite happy with how the game functions. I believe that because of all the adjustments and changes I did to the game board and the rules, the way that the board game functions and how educative it is looks alright to me. I feel that it can really teach and educate the small kids about the endangered spices.

But one of the things that I didn’t do that well is adding decorations to the game board. If I have more time and ideas, I will definitely add decorations to it. Because kids will often get attracted by fancy things, adding decorations will make the board game look more attractive and more kids will play it. Not only that, but as players, people will more likely to play games that looks good or attractive to them, and that is the importance of adding decorations. But I wasted too much of my time on making different prototypes and fixing it, I forgot the importance of decorations.

Develop and plan (board game)

Success criteria for my board game:

  • Educative
  • Fun
  • Functions well
  • Easy for kids to understand
  • Can be played multiple times
  • Enjoy with family
  • Release stress

A successful educative board game for kids must include these aspects above. Because the purpose of this board game is to educate, educative is clearly one of the most important aspects to be successful. But you kids are not often interested on learning new things, so the board game must also be fun and attractive to them. The rules of this board game must be simple and easy enough for kids to understand them quickly, if the game rule is too complicated, kids will lose their patient on understanding the game. A successful board game must also be played over multiple times, or else it will not be a game that is fun. Fun games can often be played multiple times. At last, releasing stress and enjoy with family is also one of the most important aspect of a board game. Since it is a game, it is supposed to be played and enjoyed with family, and while the family enjoys playing to board game together, it also helps the entire family release their stress.

Design choice:

At the beginning of this project, I have multiple ideas of making a board game, but after multiple rounds of selection, I lowered my design choice down to 2 different types of games: board game, card game.

The reason I picked board game and card game for my project is because they are the most common and popular games for small kids. Because educating small kids is my reason of creating a game, I must create an easy and fun game that can attract their attention. It will also needs to keep them entertained.

After some more researching and digging in to creating games, I chose to create an educative and fun board game for kids. Because I believe that if I successfully created a board game, it will be very useful to teach the small kids. Because an educative, fun and interesting will attract small kids to play. When they are playing this board game, they can enjoy the playing process while the learn about all knowledge of environment protection. When there are multiple people playing the board game at the same time, it can also reduce their stress and make these people’s relationship closer to each other,  Also, creating a board game also makes my project very flexible, because there is a wide range of board game, and each of them can have a different set of rules and different set of rules leads to different purpose and different targeted audience. All of these different types of board game can achieve my goal and purposes: educate small kids about the environmental issues happening all over the world. Because of the flexibility of creating board games, I am able to have multiple ideas on creating the board games

Model/sketches/ideas of board game:

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First board game prototype/idea:

This is the first board game sketch. The inspiration of this game board came from the game board of Aeroplane Chess, and Monopoly. I replaced some of the blocks with question marks, these question marks represents a question to the players about the environment. This first prototype of the board game is quite rough and simple. There is no specific rules to this game yet, and it doesn’t really functions well.

Second prototype of board game:

This is my second idea/sketch of the educative board game that I am thinking about. In this sketch, I added a little bit more detail on the game board. I created two layers of tiles to make this board game more playable. I also added some detailed rules and labels to this game. Adding the rules makes my game able to function and more finalised, and by adding the rules, I happen to know more about what kind of board game am I creating and what types problem is the goal for the board game to solve (environment, animal protection)

Third sketch/prototype of board game:

In this sketch, I started to focus more on the size of the game board, and the size of each grid. I tried to make the size of the game board as accurate and symmetric as possible by researching online. I also changed some of the rules in the game. I figured that making the small kids roll a dice to move its figure in the game depends more on luck, and that will not educate them. Instead of making the player roll a dice to move the figure, I decided that I will make six set of cards, and every card have questions on them about protecting the environment. Each set of cards will represent a different number of steps a player can move its figure. If the player correctly answering the questions on the cards, the player will be able to move the number of steps on the card has. But if they answers the questions incorrectly, there will be punishments of on the cards as well. The inspirations of this game came from ()智游戏. This change to the rules make sure that the game can be played multiple times, because there are a lot of questions in the set of question cards, and there will be a low chance of getting the same types questions every round.

Third/final sketch of board game:

In this last sketch of the game, I changed the function of the game board little bit. Even though the change is small, it actually changed the topic I wanted to educate and teach small kids about. Instead of using a Aeroplane Chess game board, I changed my game board to a snake game game board, and switched my educating topic from environments to endangered animals. The two topics sounds very different from each other, but there are actually a lot of similarities between them. Because protecting the endangered animals also the same as protecting the environment. I made this change to the game board because of two main reasons. The first reason is that the goal educating kids about the environmental issues is too broad, by changing the topic to protecting animals made my topic more narrow, and more easy to accomplish. The second reason is that the playability of my original game board is not high enough. In my new game board, I added hunters to increase the playability of the game, and this will attract more small kids to play.

Plans:

With the class time that I have left, my plan is to create a board game that is fun and educative board game that is small and easy to carry around. The final version of board game will be related to all the sketches I drew in class and outside of class. I will use the thin layer of wood for the game board material because it will make the game board very light and that makes it easy to carry around. I want to try and use illustrator and laser cut the shape of game board. I think that will be the best and easiest way to create a game board for my project. I will start laser cutting my first physical prototype of the game board by next class. I will try test it the game out with different and collect feed back from them.

Goals:

The final goal or target for my project is to create physical product of the game, and if I still have enough time, I will also add some decorations on the sides and grids of the board. Creating a game that can be played is my first priority right now, without a physical board game, the kids won’t learn any thing and decorations is bonus points to my board game. It might attract more kids to play, but I have to build a physical version of the board or else the kids don’t have any thing to play with.

Define and inquire of an environmental board game

 

My design problem is protecting the environment.  The environment that we are living in right now is seriously polluted by all kinds of things we do today. For example, when industry produce products, they are also polluting the environment. My goal is to create a fun and educative board game that can inform people about the environment that is being polluted right now, and raise their awareness of protecting the environment.

My targeted audience is mainly the kids that are about 4-5 grade. I chose them they are the people in the future that have the ability to protect the environment.  Another reason that I chose them is because they are at a stage of learning new things. If I try to inform the 1-3 graders about the environment, they won’t really understand what I am trying to tell them. If I try to inform people that are older, they won’t really care about the environment, because it is not easy to make a person that never cares about the environment to suddenly raise awareness of environmental protection. Also, I am creating a board game for this project, and kids often loves to play board game. Which means that my targeted audience should be kids that are 4-5 graders.

(each color represent a different people’s answer)

The survey that I created shows people only have a little bit of awareness for the environmental issues happening around the world, which proves that my thinking is correct. This also means that people need to be educated about the environmental issues that is happening around the world.

The inspirations that I put in this padlet is mainly to provide me ideas. For example, the game photosynthesis and xeko are both about protecting environments. These games gave me new ideas that can help with me creating a board game. But there are also other games that is all about being fun. The game UNO and Aeroplane Chess, these games are just fun. These game give me ideas about how to make a easy that is game fun an interesting. Even though these games are not as educative as the other games, it is much more fun and attractive compared to the other games.

 

Hunger games book 2 catching fire

First few chapters:

Book 2 of hunger games continues to talk about what happened after the hunger games from book one. After both Peta and Katherine survived in the last hunger games, the went back to normal lives and continued living. But because of they are now the champion of the hungers game, their lives are very different than before. They don’t have to worry about getting enough food or supplies to survive, because they are pretty rich now. But because they are now the champion of the hungers game, so their relationship with normal people completely changed, which means they can’t really go back to normal.

Eyeglasses design

Define and inquire:

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At first, I was looking up to create glasses that makes people looks smart, for example: Myopia glasses or learning glasses that smart people often wear. So, I searched up these kind of glasses and this images inspired me to have a basic idea of what my design will look like. My target audience for this glasses is either the smart scholars that over used its eyes on studying and needed a myopia glasses to read or the old man that can really see anything clearly and also needs the glasses to read.

But during my research, I unexpectedly saw the glasses that super hero in X-Man–Cyclops wear. This design fascinated me, I just realised that my previous design that I was thinking of might be a little bit boring and not stunning enough. The design that I wanted to do changed in to a glasses that is similar to what cyclops is wearing, because it looks cool and fascinating to me. There is also an image full of different types of glasses that made me more clear about what kind of glasses I will create, and my audience changed from the scholars and old man to teenagers that wanted the glasses to be cool and fascinating for them in order to make them look good and fashionable, teenagers often want themselves to look good, and that will be why these kind of glasses will hook their interest.

Later on, I found out that glasses cannot just look good. They must be used for something. So after some more research, I found some images of safety goggles, sunglasses, and ski goggles. I found out that most of them have a whole piece of the lens on the glasses instead of having two lenses. Multiple glasses with two separate lenses and have a thin connection between them make them easy to break. Being inspired by these eyeglasses, I decided instead of making two lenses. I will make a whole lens for the glasses to make them harder to break. This made it better for my target audience because teenagers often like to run around and break accidentally damage their lenses, which made the glasses hard to break, so it is much better for the teenagers.

Develop and plan:

When I first started sketching the first couple of sketches for the glasses, I want them to be suited for presbyopia and myopic population. I made a mind map for my glasses for what I want them to be like, and I drew the different sketches following my mind map. These glasses have the old fashion type of design, and their primary and only role is to protect the user’s eyes and make them see things more clearly if they have presbyopia or myopia. I drew multiple sketches for these glasses: perspective, isometric, 2d, 3d, and other different illustration types. These different types of illustrations make me more clear about what I am trying to make. The more sketches I drew, the more familiar I became with my design. The perspective and isometric drawing keep on adding details to my plan, and this also makes me more clear of what I am designing.

But later on, I realised that a the old fashion type of glasses is too boring to make. So, after getting some inspirations from the images on the internet, I made another mind map for my glasses and I drew a couple more sketches including 2D, 3D, isometric, and perspective to get more detailed informations. I tried to add different kind of things on my glasses: elastic bands and different lenses. After combining the images on the internet and the sketches that I drew, I have a completely new idea for my design. I decided to make a cool glasses that can have multiple usages. Having that thought in my head, I still tried to be more creative for my design, after trying a few more things on the sketches, I kind of know what will my final design be like.

Create and improve:

When I finished my planning and finally started to make the glasses based on my final plan. At first, I did not just begin to create my glasses. I did some practice on the laser cutting tool illustrator. The most important skill I learned on illustrator is using a different kind of pen tool. We did a learning exercise during class, where we have to outline the logo mainly using the pen tool, which made me more familiar with the illustrator.

 

First prototype:

After I got more familiar with illustrator, I started to design my first prototype of the glasses. But because I am not experienced with laser cutting, this made my first prototype not very successful. The arms of the glasses are too thin and too fragile for the glasses, and the glasses itself is also thin and not big enough for wearing. I got some experience from this prototype, I learned to check the size of the prototype before cutting it, and I got even more familiar with illustrator.

Second prototype:

After getting feed back from the teachers, I tried to make my second prototype bigger and stronger than my first prototype. I tried to pull my prototype bigger on illustrator, but it didn’t really work out, because pulling the prototype in illustrator has led to a problem of proportions of the prototype. So I have to changed the width and length in a different way that won’t cause problems for the proportions. After I finally found a way to do that, a different problem occurred. From my pervious prototype, there is a problem that I did not realise. The arm of the glasses cannot attach with the glasses itself. So after a some feedbacks from teachers and other students, I made a little hole on both left and right side of the glasses, and I made added a protruding part to insert into the hole for attaching the arms and glasses.

Final product:

The two prototypes have made my idea of design more clear, so after some adjustments, I decided to start laser cutting my final project. The adjustments I made is 1. Because the holes on the glasses and the protruding part of the arms don’t fit together, so I got some feedbacks from different teachers and then I adjust the hole on the glasses and the protruding part on the arms to make them fit more perfectly and had a few more tests to see how these well two parts fits  . together 2. Because my second prototype is still a little bit thin for wearing, I made it slightly more thick and stronger then it used to be. The adjustments I made according to my observation and feedbacks from other seems to make my final product more finalised and better.

                                                                                         

Share and reflect:

The final glasses that I create have an effective response to your user because the glasses I made have mostly covered all the aspects in my mind map. The arms of the glasses have a special hook to hold the ears of the wearer so that it won’t fall off easily. There are only on lens and a thick layer on top of my glasses which makes it more strong and last longer due to its hardness. Most importantly, because of the shape and arms of the glasses, it is pretty eye-catching, and if I have more time, I will add lens in to make look even better.

I think for this project I did well on trying out and learning through out the create and improve part. Even though my prototypes are not as good as I thought they will be, but I learned from the mistakes and I fixed them quickly. I learned and develop a lot of different skills and I have gain a lot more experience through out this process and I think that is what I did well for this project.

What I will do if I have more time is to add a colourful lens made out of acrylic in my final product. That will make my final glasses look much better and make them be more useful on sun protection and other things. I might also make the a flexible arms for my glasses if I have more time, because I can’t fold my arms, and that makes the glasses takes up a lot of spaces, if I make arms that are able to fold, it will be much better for the wearer. What I will do next time is making more prototypes for me to discover what will work the best for glasses. After this project, I realised the importance of testing and making more prototypes, this help me eliminate all the things that don’t fit with glasses and it will make me find out what perfectly fits the glasses

 

Final post for Hunger games

I finished the book hunger games over the break and this is the final post for the book. The book hunger games is a series of books that talks mainly about the gap between the riches and the poor. The back ground of this book goes like this: there are a capital city where all the rich people lives, and there is 12 different districts where the poor people lives. Each few years, there will be a game called the hunger games hold by the capital, this game is about randomly selecting 2 people from each district and putting them on the battle field. Their only goal will be survive, the last person standing gets to win the game, and their whole family gets rewarded by the capital, they won’t be poor ever again. The reason that the capital host this game is because they want to “remind the whole world about the pain of war”. But the real meaning of this game is to entertain the rich people and suppress the poor with fear. This book is a book that has a very deep meaning on the society today, and problems of this society, I will highly recommend a friend to read this book.

Recycle wallet design

(Prototype 1)                                      (Prototype 2)              (Prototype 3/Final project)

For prototype 1, I mainly used foam and soft plastic to create my wallet. I also put   some images on top of my design. This wallet is pretty stable, but the disadvantages of this prototype is that because the materials I used to create this design is too hard, so the top part of this design can’t be easily fold down, and because the first prototype is just for experiment, so I forgot to calculate the size of the wallet, the bottom part of wallet is not big enough to put in anything.

The second prototype is made out of paper, this one is better than the last one, the size of it is pretty good, but because I used paper as the main material for this prototype, this caused the wallet to be too soft, and cannot hold anything. Because it is paper, so most of the materials cannot fit on this paper easily, so this wallet is also not good enough.

The third prototype have four main materials, paper, plastic Insulation foil, and polystyrene. I used Insulation foil to cover up the whole design to make it look shiny and beautiful. The use of polystyrene is to stable insulation foil, and to make the inside of the wallet soft. Plastic is used to protect the polystrene from melting. The paper is just an outline for the wallet, to make sure the wallet looks just right. This wallet improved most of the above shortcomings and it also improved by being more useful. But there are still some shortages that haven’t been solved, or can be improved.

One thing I will do better next time is spend more time on experimenting different materials, because I did not spend enough time on experimenting, it caused me more time afterwards to find out which kinds of materials matches better. Because I am unfamiliar with different materials, so when I am making my product, matching with different materials really took me a long time, and I also made a few mistakes with matching materials.

One thing I did well this time is that I spent time on getting inspiration of design idea.This is important because a good design idea can save you a lot of time to on making this product, and it will make your making process easier. I also learned from pervious mistakes I made, for example my first prototype was too hard, so I made my second prototype with paper trying to make it softer. But it turns out to be a bit too soft, so in my third prototype, I used different materials to make the softness just right. This shows that I am learning from pervious mistakes.

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The journal of French Revolution

This French Revolution was very worth. I say this because even though this French Revolution caused millions of death and pain. It destroyed millions of buildings and made the economic loosed heavily, but this revolution also changed the point of view and perspective of the people seeing this society. Before this revolution, a king can almost do whatever he wants, and the rich and powerful people can also use their money to do everything. The can just ignore the laws. Looking back now, every one need to follow the laws no matter who you are. Before this revolution, the social structure were very unbalanced, 80 percent of the citizens were very poor people. But now, the social structure is pretty balanced. There are still rich and poor people, but this kind of thing are getting less. The French Revolution didn’t just the society at the time, it is also changed the way that we think, this means the French Revolution is still affecting in a good way today. This is why I think the French Revolution is worthy.