‘You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.’ – Wayne Gretzky, hockey

Journal entry #5

The theme of this week was inventing games. We started the class by playing a game that the group of the week had organized. It involved trying to throw a squishy ball into a hoop hanging on the wall. You were not able to move your feet when you had the ball but could pivot. After the warm-up game we got into small groups to discuss this weeks readings. One of the mini-activities within our groups was drawing one of the stages of inventing games – it was pretty challenging!

The next part of the class was my favourite. We got to invent our own games in groups of 6 people. Out game category was net/wall games and the aim was to ‘send the object back to the opponent so they are unable to return the object back’. We created a game called ‘tap-a-dice’ which utilized:

  • two die (1 which had exercises on it and 1 that had numbers like a regular dice)
  • a foamy paddle for each player
  • traffic cones (to demonstrate the boundaries)
  • 1 bench to divide the teams

The goal of the game was to send the dice over the net so it would land on the opponents side. This meant that they would have to do the exercises. The steps of the game were:

  1. Divide players into 2 teams on either side of the bench, each player gets one paddle
  2. Have the referee or coach throw the number dice. Whatever number lands face up is the number of exercises you have to do.
  3. Teams do rock, paper, scissors and whichever team is the winner gets to serve the exercise dice.
  4. The dice mast be tapped twice by 2 different team members before being sent back over the bench.
  5. When the exercise dice falls on the floor whichever side it falls on that group must do the exercise.
  6. The losing group gets to roll the number dice and serve.