"Create Your Own Board Game"

Miss C was lucky enough to participate in a great homeschool class this April through June. Called "Design Your Own Board Game," the class was geared for ages 9-13. It was really a research class in disguise.

A very special teacher, Laurie Spigel, organized the class. Laurie is a longtime homeschool mom (with sons ages 15 and 21) who takes a Renaissance approach to all her classes. (Miss C has also taken "Art History of the Ancient World" and "Poetry Workshop and Book Club Discussion" with her.) Laurie has put together a great resource site for homeschoolers, HomeschoolNYC. She designed this class based on the experience of her youngest son, who, over the years, created three increasingly sophisticated versions of a game on marine biology.

The class began with supplies ordered from a company called Bare Books. In addition to blank books and puzzles for creative kids, they sell blank board game kits. These come with playing pieces, dice, card sets (for question or action cards to place in the center of the board), and a blank game board. The ones Laurie chose had squares along all four sides of the board, but it's possible to buy completely blank ones, as well.

During classes, Laurie gave a course in how to do research. Class discussions were about using the Internet, specialized libraries in New York (the class was held in Manhattan), interviews with knowledgeable people, and other sources for background research. Each week the project would move further along. The kids were assigned to create 30 question cards, with questions and answers about their game's subject. Kids chose their own subjects. Game subjects included oceanography, King Arthur, breeds of dogs, The Sphinx, and mice, among others.


Miss C chose to create a game based on The Great Depression. She's been fascinated with this era for some time, beginning with her American Girl doll, Kit, one of the historical dolls whose books are set during the Depression. Miss C read all the American Girl historical doll books between 5 and 6. Her first and favorite series were those about Kit -- so she finally got Kit for her sixth birthday.

Miss C scoured the Internet for images related to the Great Depression, copyright be damned (actually, it's okay to use found images as long as the use is private, and not published or sold publicly). She cleaned up and cropped them in Photoshop (her favorite program). She even outlined images to be "cut out," like Shirley Temple (see above), and I stepped in only to do the "hard part" for her, around Shirley's hair.

I then created a layout in PageMaker based on the measurements of the board game. Note, this is not necessary. You can just glue down individual images in squares and in the center, and write on the board as well. But, we're geeks, so why not go all the way? Miss C placed all the images in layout, rotated them, rotated type, and so on. Angles never seemed so fascinating in math, but when rotating images for her board game, she was an expert. She would eyeball a spot, and say, "That's a 135" [degree angle]."

The research part of the project was both fun and intense. We visited many Web sites, brought home a large stack of books from the library, and took photos of the WPA mural in our local post office (she didn't end up using it in the game). We watched "The Grapes of Wrath" and a documentary from the late '30s, "Our Daily Bread." She watched (again) a lot of Shirley Temple movies. Like everything else, you could make more or less of the project. I think we really made the most of it, and Miss C learned an incredible amount, not just about the Great Depression, but about pacing herself over a 10-week course, doing research, designing and executing the project, and writing the instructions.

She also became a whiz at adding negative and positive numbers, to keep score. Many squares in her game were assigned negative points -- for example, -5 for Herbert Hoover and -4 for the Dust Bowl -- just like going into debt or losing money on stocks during the Depression. Her idol, Eleanor Roosevelt, brought a whopping +6 points.

The highest compliment she could have been paid was when friends from California visited, and played her game with her, giving her their full attention, participation, and interest. We thank them for that... and it's all the reward she could have needed to take on her next project, whatever it might be.