As my first honors experience in my first semester of college, Math Games and Puzzles (MATH3096) was a way to get a feel for the honors program while enjoying the enticing subject of gameplay and learning some techniques to help me on later in my life.  This class introduced many unique types of games and different ways to analyze them in a way to see ahead to what might occur before it actually does.  We learned interesting ways to classify different moves of combinatorial games with ways including binary code and matrix multiplication, and towards the end of the semester, we each created our own game, which in my case, was a puzzle modeled off one of the several we learned about in class.  The skills I learned in this class not only will help me with my game strategy, but it taught me how to look at problems differently and classify each move as a step into looking to find the next move that would work best towards the goal I am approaching.  Instead of just “playing” a game and hoping for the best, I can now identify where a certain strategy would be best and when luck probably is not on my side.  This class was a nice break from the strains of chemistry and calculus and showed me how versatile certain math aspects are to everyday life. 

Below is a link to the game I created in this class and it's solution as well as the steps I took to create the game.