Build a Better Empire

Once civilizations began to arise, the next step is for those dominate civilizations to start to collect power - ultimate power and control and land and resources and … once this starts to happen we move into the realm of EMPIRES!

Cue the music ….

For this unit, you and your allies will construct a board game, with the goal of the game - to build the ultimate board game!

But before you can get to that part, we need to know some basic information on empires, what let to their rise and ultimately what caused them to fail. We will look at the empires of Assyria, Egypt, Persia, Maurya (in India), Gupta (in India), Zhou (in China), Qin (in China), Han (in China), Greece, and Rome.

This will process will take us a few weeks - these empires can be found in Ch. 3, 4, and 5 of your textbook, but like always that’s just one resource.

Each of these empires rose to power for different reasons, had major influences on their cultures, and ultimately failed for a variety of reasons. Your job will be to identify, explain, and analyze this information to figure out how to build the ultimate empire and incorporate that into your board game.

Gathering Information - you will gather basic data/information on each civilization. I will provide you with a form to organize your information. Each person is responsible for completing this form on each empire. Each of these data forms will be a minor grade (so require an OPTIC which will be a major component of this grade).

Analyzing Your Data - Now that you have basic data and terms for each empire, it’s time to examine this information for common themes (sometimes in analyzing you need to return to information sources for additional information as well - this is okay). You will receive a form to help you analyze the information needed to make connections - looking for common themes as to why empires succeed and what caused them to fail. Your data analysis form will count as a double minor grade (you should have to do some thinking so it’s worth more)

Creation - Now that you have basic information on the major early empires and you have analyzed this information and found common themes, it’s time to create your board game. Your game will allow players to gather information/resources needed to build an empire, while trying avoid the pitfalls that lead to empire collapse. How this is done is up to you! This will be your unit assessment - your game should so and even require some knowledge of the empires, the characteristics of their success and failure.