Here are a few pictures from our Viking Board Game Project! This started life as a lesson about Viking traders and raiders and as a class we agreed it would be fun to design a trading game inspired by this historical understanding.
We initially examined board games of a similar nature (e.g. Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan etc.) involving trade and in particular looked at how their instructions worked.
This was our next task - to design a game and write the instructions to match. This is a challenging task, especially as all the games were unique! Pupils then made very rough, simplified prototypes of their games and tested them in groups to ensure that the games ran properly and that the instructions were easy to follow.
These pictures are taken at the next stage - pupils have created their final board games and are evaluating them in groups. But there was one final twist...…
Thanks to our very talented parent body - I had also managed to line up the opportunity to have one (and hopefully another one in the near future) of the games turned into a very professional-looking version. This added a great competitive element and the pupils democratically elected the winning game(s). It also gave a further chance to refine the games before going to the designer (i.e. to add more historical detail etc.) which was an important part of the process.
This has been a great inquiry-based project involving history, literacy and design and technology skills and the children have thoroughly enjoyed seeing their designs go from initial sketches to their finished versions and it was great to see such variety and creativity in the games!
