Board Game Project

Since the beginning of the pandemic, board game sales have skyrocketed. I thought it would be fun to have 5th graders design and build their own board games.

It's a great project for teaching the basics of the design thinking process and it pulls in a lot of skills we want them to start learning now to be ready for our middle school DCM curriculum.

We started by learning about the history of board games, then each group came up with an idea for a game.

They designed their boards (2D design) using Gravit Designer which, unfortunately, no longer esists.

With the boards done, we moved on to their games pieces (3D design & fabrication). I taught them Tinkercad and then helped them 3D print their pieces (max 12 per group so I wouldn't go crazy with all the print jobs).

Finally, we assembled prototypes and tested (by playing the game of course). They were almost universally surprised to find out that their games didn't work as well on the first try and as they had hoped. So, we talked about one of the most important ideas in design thinking: iteration. The students iterated and tested some more. By the end, they all had pretty good games!