Monday morning is the regular end-of-ethics-week final classes in the morning. Morning classes are usually full of kids from North America, because it’s early evening over there. Honestly I was glad to be finished this week’s Energy topic, for reasons I touched on earlier. I tried to revise the plan on the fly to include more open-ended discussion questions, and it worked a bit, but was still not as open as I’d have liked. Never mind, on to the new topic! It’s on Pets, and I’ll write the plan tomorrow.
This afternoon I worked solidly on Irregular Webcomic! I made 10 new strips, using the photos I took a few weeks ago. I now have a full 3-week buffer, which will hopefully give me time to write new strips and take more photos before it runs out.
Tonight was lesson 3 in my current instance of the Creative Thinking/Board Game Design class. This is where the course gets really interesting and fun, as we converge down the brainstorming ideas we did last week and come up with a theme for the game we’ll be designing. After the three students voted, we had two theme ideas on equal footing: Colonising lands, and “a shiny crystal ball”. I did a tie-break and selected what I think is the more interesting option, the crystal ball. So… we’re designing a board game about crystal balls!
We’ve already thought of one possible rules mechanic. During the game set up, you lay out a series of cards face down, which represent things that happen on future turns of the game, and by using a crystal ball you get to look at a future card. So you know what will happen on that turn. Then you can use that knowledge to your advantage. Perhaps the rules require you to reveal or hint something about the future to the other players, or perhaps you can bluff about it. Next week we’ll work on more mechanics and refining the game rules into something workable.
New content today: