Today in world building camp, we opened with the hard science of building a world from the ground up using actual science and probability. This activity comes from a series of unit plans on roleplaying science lessons I did with my daughter during covid homeschool. This particular activity, called roll up a planet 1-3, is free. I simplified it a bit for camp purposes (mostly by creating a periodic table chart that only includes the listed elements and has them in order of density with the colors) because I’m not actually teaching the period table, and if you’d like access to that, email me your download receipt (personal info redacted) from Hellmund Science, and I’ll happily share.

Now in the original version, the point of this is to show how rare a planet like Earth is. For creative writing camp, it’s a brainstorming game. Okay, your planet formed without water. Let’s imagine some alternate life or technology to settle there!

After lunch, we learned about Sanderson’s 4 laws of building magic systems. Click through the slideshow for more information.