StarGuards is a collaborative problem-solving game played by Year 5 students as part of their learning about the solar system.

Welcome to the solar system in 2150. Every inch of the solar system has been explored and all the planets are used by humans.

A series of space challenges are on the horizon. How will you, the rulers of the solar system, solve these challenges?

In the game, we have ‘open negotiation’, where everyone tries to come up with ideas to solve the space challenges.  Every time a group of people think they have the solution to a space challenge, they must explain the solution to the Fates. If the Fates agree that this solution is acceptable, the challenge is solved.

Teams

• Fate (2 students) – they run the game and can make up new rules
• Voyager 1 (2 students) – they tell everyone what the space challenges are
• the Moon (2 students) – they have resources and a spaceship
• Earth (3 students) – they have resources and a spaceship
• Mercury (2 students) – they have resources and a spaceship
• Mars (3 students) – they have resources and a spaceship
• Venus (2 students) – they have resources and a spaceship
• Saturn (3 students) – they have resources and a spaceship
• Jupiter (3 students) – they have resources and a spaceship
• Uranus (2 students) – they have resources and a spaceship
• Venus (2 students) – they have resources and a spaceship

Things to solve the space challenges with

• machines
• ideas
• resources from teams
• space ships from teams
• your creative thinking!

 

Game Documents

Here are all the documents I’ve made to make the game. In no particular order, here they are…

Here are a few PowerPoint slides explaining the main structure of the game:

Instruction manual for teachers:

Here is the main guidebook:

Here is a teacher support document that shows where in the Victorian and Australian curricula the skills and knowledge the game deals with can be found:

Here’s an A3 document you could print out and stick on the wall while they are playing – it documents the process for solving a space challenge:

You need the font “Sheeping Dogs” to see some of these documents, available free here:

https://www.dafont.com/sheeping-dogs.font

Here is a glossary of words they might need to know to play the game:

Here is the main list of ideas that the cosmologists have:

Here are the machines that the engineers can build:

Sometimes if they win too quickly I say an evil supergenius alien has been watching your progress and is only willing to let the solar system survive if people can answer these questions, I usually do one question per team:

Here is the intro PowerPoint I use to introduce the game to students:

Here is the spreadsheet I used to plan / design the game:

If you want to put them in the teams randomly, you could print this out, cut it up and get them to pick a role at random from a hat:

This was my original rough idea for the board. Then a Year 11 Product Design class at my school properly designed and built it (as you can see from the pictures above)…

Here are the objects used in the game – either spaceships, resources (like minerals), engineers machines and objects representing space challenges. I scoured second hand shops for weird looking objects and printed the rest 3D. The best place I have found to find 3D printer files is http://www.thingiverse.com

And here is a document with lanyards the kids can wear while playing, so everyone knows what team they are in:

If you’d like more information about this simulation game, and how to play it, get in touch: