~Monday~ Tonight's class was fun and interesting, and shortly before it, we received our grade on our first journal submission, for which I received an "A."
I noted on Facebook that if I were taking this class in a degree program, meaning that this grade would count toward my GPA, it would have actually lowered my overall GPA (from my time in grad school). If you want to see what that GPA was, you can go to this page, and scroll toward the bottom. Such an over-achiever. 🙂
The professor’s feedback (noted in red below) in three areas made me smile:
Communication Patterns
● What are the key social interactions (e.g., direct competition, collaboration, deceit, alliances, trading, parallel personal achievement, etc.)?
○ Help from Jen in learning the game
○ As others caught on, some helping of each other
○ Direct competition
○ Clarifying and qualifying questions about what various cards did
○ Varying degrees of confusion along the way
○ Trading
○ Parallel personal achievement
Wonderful communication write-up
Space
● Is the game mobile? Do you end in the same space you begin? I’m making a distinction between portable and mobile. I would say it’s portable in that it’s stored in a box and you can take it anywhere with you. If by mobile, we mean playing it while moving, that wouldn’t work so well. Unless you were on a train with a car with a table in it on which you could play. We, however, stayed in the same place while we played. I like this distinction very much.
Learning
● New content knowledge: I learned from boardgamegeek.com that there is a lexicon to describe the “mechanics” of games, of which 7 Wonders’ are: Card Drafting (meaning “players pick cards from a common pool to gain some immediate advantage or to assemble hands of cards that are used to meet objectives within the game”), Set Collection (meaning “encourages a player to collect a set of items”), Simultaneous Action Selection (meaning “lets players secretly choose their actions. After they are revealed, the actions resolve following the ruleset of the game”), and Variable Player Powers (meaning “it grants different abilities and/or paths to victory to the players”). Great observations!
During the last hour (of the 3-hour) class, Jen and I shared our idea with Brad (the professor) for the game we've begun to design for our group project.
For the last 15 or so minutes of class, a group of us played Rummoli.