Maker Faire Blog Post about “Terrafirma"
By: Eli Mckoy Beiser, Augie Nice, and Nate Sommer
Our Maker Faire project was called Terrafirma. It was a board game where you would try to run a civilization. You had to make sure your civilians had food, water, and energy everyday. you had to build farms, water purifiers, and factories to provide those things. For everyday your civilians had these things, you got a point. Now for the hard part, getting these things for your civilians required you to put Co2 into your civilization’s atmosphere, we would add 10 Co2 to your atmosphere for every farm, water purifier, and factory you had per day. Once you added 400 Co2 to the atmosphere, your civilization would come to an end. So your goal as the player was to get as far as you could while keeping your civilians alive. The objective of our project was to make people more aware of how hard it is to provide people with their needs, while also balancing the trouble of climate change. Our project has very specific examples, and there are more problems you will encounter in running a civilization. One thing we thought was that people thought we should just get rid of fossil fuels, but those are how tons of people get energy. So our objective was not to tell people that fossil fuels are good and everyone should use them, but that thoughts saying to just get rid of fossil fuels should be given a better solution with more thought, we’re letting people know that solving climate change is a bit more complex than some people think. We were inspired to do this project because we have been talking about climate change a lot in school, whether it be a movie about it, or a science project about it, we talked about it a lot. This made us think more about that problem and we thought this would be the perfect opportunity to make people more aware. We only had two weeks to make this project so we had to work quickly while still making people aware of the complexity in climate change. In this time we think we still managed to make a fun game that still communicated the message we trying to get across.
The biggest challenge throughout the process of making this game was figuring out what our numbers would be, and how they would work. For example what number of Co2 would they have to have for their civilization to end. We overcame this by making a plan one day, making sure it worked, and then just changing things that didn’t work. For around 2 days we were testing numbers with people in the class to see what did not work for us. In fact, on the day of the faire we had to change a few numbers to make sure everything worked smoothly. In the end all our numbers worked fine, but it took awhile to find the numbers that worked.
So, Terrafirma was full of ups and downs. However, we learned a lot in the process: How to make the numbers work so that it was possible to play the game, how to adapt our original idea to fit constraints and problems that came up during our work process, and how to stick with a project even when it starts to look hopeless. But when we were done, we still felt like there was so much more that we could have done. For example, if we had more time, we would have made the game more pleasing to the eye, as we kind of had to rush the cutting and gluing of the buildings, they were made of cardboard which made it harder to look perfect. We also would have added more variables so there were more than one strategy to play. However, if you want to make a climate change board game, there are some things that we would suggest. First, plan everything! We thought that things would fall into place as we worked, but this was not the case. In addition, don’t rush the making of the game itself. It is very important that it looks polished so that people want to come and play your game. Lastly, play test as much as possible. The more you play test, the more likely it is that you will catch errors and make the game more fun to play and less hard to run.
In our project we used all school resources: paint and markers from the art room, cardboard and cardboard scissors from the maker room, hot glue from the science room, wood from Ms. Hills farm. So we spent no extra money on our project.
Sources:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/carbon-dioxide-emissions-rise-to-24-million-pounds-per-second/
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