Play while you learn! Learn while you play!

The 12 fifth-grade students in Discovery Elementary School's SAGE classroom have created games that will soon be on their way to a national toy competition, the West Coast National Toychallenge.

Toychallenge is a design competition for fifth- through eighth-graders that inspires teams of students to use their imagination while drawing on principles of science, engineering, and math.

The Discovery students were challenged to come up with a brand new game that has not yet been created. Working in small groups, they spent several weeks brainstorming, developing, and writing about their inventions:

• To-Do: a chore game that not only teaches young players about chores but makes it fun to do chores, too (and parents thought that was impossible!).
• What Am I?: an animal riddle game that requires riddle solving and a careful sense of touch to find hidden animals.
• Creation Nation: a three-skill level creativity game that challenges players to make the given item in a set amount of time using the given materials.

The ideas were good enough to qualify for the West Coast competition in San Diego on May 31. There, Discovery will vie against 120 other teams. Students will spend the preceding weeks making prototypes of their games to present.