Macbeth Benchmark (Kiah and Harlem)

Posted by Kiah Johnson in English 1 - Giknis - A on Monday, January 18, 2016 at 4:19 pm

The purpose of our project, the board game, is to show how we can incorporate creativity and fun into learning about Shakespeare's book, Macbeth. When reading Macbeth, we know how it feels to be confused and you don't understand what the book is saying, but by playing our game, our trivia would inform you all about the book!

The Rationale

The process of creating the game board of Macbeth was surprisingly easy, but there were a few challenges we had to overcome. We chose to make a game board because we felt that kids love to play board games, and if they can learn and play games at the same time, they would be enjoying themselves while getting an education. Shakespeare and his plays can be hard to understand at first glance, so why not make on into something simpler, like a game? It also gave us a chance to use our creativity skills, such as the 3D printer, which we used to make the game’s pieces.

For the game board’s creation, we decided to make it look like the original game, Candy Land We made it look like Candy Land because we thought that Candy Land was a great game that people loved to play with their families, so we just figured that if the game looked liked Candy Land, they would want to play for a long time. From then on, we tried to make everything that goes along with Candy Land, like making the game board colorful and making the squares loop, twist, and turn. The game’s objective obviously had to be different than Candy Land, so we settled on was to show how Macbeth started as a soldier who was loyal to his king, the war zone, to an evil mastermind that wants to kill people who get in his way, at Inverness. Every piece on the board has a their own function, adding a challenge to the game and making getting to Inverness difficult, since Macbeth’s transformation from good to bad was the same exact way.

Originally, we weren’t planning on doing a game board box, but since we got an extension for the project, we decided that we could make our project a little better by making a box for it. To start, we got a shoe box and covered the whole box with brown paper, and then we ended up not liking it so much, so we wrapped it with red paper, and it looked a lot better. After, we both came up with our own sketches of the box front, then we chose which one was better and we drew it on the box. We decided on the sketch of the crown hovering over the hand with the blood dripping from it. The story behind the sketch was that it was snowing, and people normally put the hand out of the window and feel the snow on their hand, and it’s a happy time. We figured Macbeth is the complete opposite, so we made a crown instead of a cloud, to show that Macbeth wants the crown so he is holding his hand out for the crown. After we did that, we replaced the snow with rain, and then we made the rain into drops of blood. We did this because we realized Macbeth had to kill a lot of people for the crown, so the blood is coming from the crown into his hand. Lastly, we made the blood drip from his hand to the floor so it looks like it is too much blood for him to hold, since Macbeth killed so many people, it was too much for him to handle, therefore too much blood to hold.