Fifth Grade Designers Bring Operation: Wilderness Edition to Life

Fifth graders put their creativity and collaboration skills to the test during their most recent rotation in ILIS with a project that combined coding, design and hands-on making. During the past few weeks, students have worked in small groups to design and build their own working game, inspired by the classic Operation, with a fun twist connected to the 5th grade overnight trip. Students created their games based on the theme of wilderness and survival.

Using tools they’ve learned throughout the years, including Scratch Coding, and integrating physical computing with Makey Makeys, students brought their games to life. They designed a game board, coded sounds and movements and used the Makey Makey board to connect their digital creations to real-world circuits. Just like in Operation, players had to try to remove an object from the board without touching the sides—otherwise, the buzzer sounded! To accomplish this, students used materials including conductive tape, tongs (to grab the pieces), wire (to connect their Makey Makeys to the game and computers) and the Scratch coding to create the sounds and visuals. It was a great, hands-on way for them to see how problem-solving and programming logic come together to bring a game to life, right down to the last buzz!

This project helped students build up their coding, physical computing and design thinking skills, and it also fostered teamwork, creativity and problem-solving. Students planned together, sketched ideas, tested code, fixed bugs and redesigned when things didn’t go as planned.

To make their games unique, each group designed their own theme, artwork and game pieces. Students drew their designs by hand and used Canva’s AI image generator to create visuals. They revisited what they’ve learned about using AI thoughtfully and responsibly. They also got to use the laser cutter to make their own custom game pieces before decorating them to match their design. This process started with simple paper-and-pencil sketches of creative game pieces like a “cute bunny” or “wilderness first aid kit.” Next, they placed these hand-drawn sketches directly into the Glowforge, where a built-in camera scanned their drawings and turned them into digital designs. From there, a piece of draftboard was placed into the machine and the laser was instructed to precisely cut out their unique shapes, creating perfectly sized game pieces. They used this same "sketch-to-digital" process to instruct the laser to engrave their pieces as well.

Once the games were complete, students had a share-out day to show off their creations and play one another’s games. The 5th graders did a wonderful job creating these games. It was so much fun to hear those buzzers going off as they brought their Operation: Wilderness Edition games to life!

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