And Now, Something a Bit Different. Designing My Own Game for Calculus!

This spring, my teaching load is lighter than normal (I'm still technically "overloaded" but only by two-thirds of a course).  In total, I have two Calculus I lectures and two Calculus I labs and that's it for my teaching load!  Since I have only one main prep, I figured this was the perfect time to sharpen some of the games and activities that I do in class - and with that, I wanted to share one of my games here.

Years ago (2016 or 2017 I think) when I was scouring the web for interesting Calculus teaching ideas, I stumbled across a math blog where the author discussed a game that they use in their classroom, something they called Survival of the Fittest.  The author made some paper cards that had drawings of basic supplies and then the students could earn those supplies and complete various challenges.  The winning team would be the last team standing and would earn some sort of prize.  

The blog article immediately got me thinking about how I could do a similar concept in my college class.  Of course, as someone who loves board games of all types and sizes, I wanted to take the basic concept in that blog and expand upon it in a variety of ways.  Over the past several years, I've created countless paper prototypes (with paper cards glued onto old playing cards).  I polled my students at the end of each semester and used their feedback to make the next attempt that much better.  

An item card prototype

The above Water Bottle card is an example of what I have been using for the past several years.  The card is an item card that students can earn by doing well on Calculus problems.  The card has several different components including a large image (using an open source icon webpage), a short description, a title, a category (the popcorn symbol here indicates this is a "food" item), and finally, a rarity (the Spades icon indicates this is a common item).  That's right, I took some ideas from collectible trading card games and made rarity tiers for the items students could earn!

After using the cards for several years (replacing ones that didn't work as intended and fixing as many typos or points of confusion as possible), I decided that I was ready to roll my game out in a much more official capacity.  That's right, I self-published my game and it's now ready to roll for the upcoming spring semester!

I call my game Calculus Island and I describe it as a cross between The Hunger Games and the TV show Survivor.  I found some free software that allowed me to create basic game cards and then used more free resources to create a bunch of AI-generated art for my cards.  Once everything was ready to go, I placed an order with a print shop (that turned out to be in China) and about ten days later or so, I had a box in my mailbox with my brand-new game all printed and ready to go!

As a point of comparison, here's the new and improved Water Bottle card that I'll be using starting this week in class!

I think the improvement is quite drastic, don't you?!  Several big changes including the black border (used for all item cards), a color photo (thanks to AI), and a slightly spiffed-up card layout.  The cards are all printed with a linen finish which makes them feel professional - honestly, the quality is such that if I had these cards show up in a board game that I bought, I wouldn't complain about them at all!  I was super impressed with how they turned out.

In the end, I created a deck of 55 item cards - the common items (Spades) occur four teams each in the deck, the uncommon (Clubs) occur three times, the rare (diamonds) Occur twice, and the ultra-rare (Hearts) only occur once in the deck.  That said, my plan is to shuffle three full decks together to create the entire pool from which students will be able to draw their item cards.  

In addition to the item decks, I also created a 55-card "Producer Event" deck.  I use the producer cards to set forth a challenge that the teams must overcome using their acquired item cards.  If they can't (or don't want to) meet a particular challenge, then their team loses health points.  Eventually, every team except one will be out of health points and the last team standing is the winner!  

Here's an old producer card called The Kraken:

And now, here's the new and improved version (with the exception that I didn't catch my typo on the spelling of Kraken in the title until this very moment scanning the cards...whoops)!:

As you can see, I updated the producer cards in much the same way I did the event cards with the major change being white borders for the producer cards.  The two different border colors will allow me to sort the cards quickly at the end of each class - one of the many tricks I learned was important by running the game so many semesters in a row prior to getting my cards printed!  Another change is the rarity tiers for the producer events.  I grouped the events into three main levels with level one being the least punishing (for example, the Kraken is a level one card) and the level three cards being the most punishing.  In this way, I can start the first couple of weeks of the semester only using level one events and know that no team should end up totally eliminated.  Once teams have had a chance to earn several supply cards, I can introduce the level two events, and then, eventually, the level three events.  I should note that there are some positive events in each of the three rarity tiers, students didn't like every single producer event card being bad!

Finally, what would decks of cards be without nice-looking card backs?  Once again, I used an AI art generator to create two similar (but distinct) card backs - one for the student item deck and one for the producer event deck:

I'm quite tickled with how the cards turned out - so much so that I felt the need to share them on the blog!

Hopefully, the game will be a hit with the new cards - I do plan to continue to tweak the items and cards and eventually, I'll probably publish a "version 2" of the game.  For now though, I can't wait for the semester to get underway properly so that I can introduce the cards (students won't see the cards until Monday of next week so my loyal readers are getting a sneak peek at things)!