Has Mario ever influenced your creative schoolwork?

J

JFrombaugh

Goomba
I was wondering if the Mario series has ever been an inspiration to you for creative projects in school, whether it was for art, writing, or even just a shout-out in one of the many things you did for fun as a kid.

I'm remembering a project for high school Creative Writing. The only requirement for our stories (beyond a minimum length) was that the first few sentences had to be:
"I could tell that it was going to be one of those days. Nothing seemed to go right all day. I was mindlessly sitting at my desk when all of a sudden the classroom door swung open and there appeared…" (or something along those lines)

In my story, the person who appeared was Princess Peach. I then remembered that today was the day of our Mushroom Kingdom field trip. We went outside and were assigned to one of three princesses who were to be our tour guides; I ended up with Rosalina. (I was trying to get all 120 Stars in Super Mario Galaxy at the time, and yes I did have a slight crush on her :-[)

We took a warp pipe to the Mushroom World and ended up in Sarasaland as evidently the closest pipe to "our area of the real world" was there. Then we discovered we had to take an Evacuated Tube Train that allowed for rapid transit between Sarasaland and the Mushroom Kingdom, moving at over 3,400 mph (no idea where I came up with that number other than my Physics teacher had told our class a little while back that it was theoretically possible for a "Maglev train" to reach speeds of 5,000 km/h if inside a vacuum tunnel due to the lack of air resistance).

Daisy explained to us that it was largely thanks to games like Mario Kart Wii, the Mario Party series, and other sports games that building this ETT project had even been possible, as those had helped with relations between the two kingdoms, not to mention funding for the project. It was Rosalina's first time riding, Daisy had ridden it many times before so her group went first, followed by Peach's group, and then us. Rosalina did just fine being a space traveller/goddess and all, though I remember I had wrote that a couple of the people in my group looked very queasy getting off it. :)

(If you want more info on Vacuum Tube Trains, you can read up here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain)

After that, it was a short walk from Town Town train station to Peach's Castle, and then our tour guides showed us all around the castle. After that we had a banquet all together, and then we were given a few minutes with our princesses to ask them any questions. I asked Rosalina a few things about the Lumas, what her job was like, etc. And then we took the ETT back to the warp pipe, and then the pipe back to the "real world".

I ended up being so proud of my story that I read it aloud in class on the due date when the teacher offered us to (albeit somewhat embarassedly) and the other students absolutely LOVED it. If only I still had the document...I would definitely upload it to the Fan stuff section here.

But anyway, that was a few years ago and looking back I think it was really kind of amusing. Anyone else have a simular story, or other times Mario has gotten into their schoolwork in some form or another?
 
I reviewed Super Mario 64 for one piece of my English Language coursework in Year 12 (age 16 --> 17).
 
I made a paper Mario for 8th grade art class. I can upload a photo if someone wants to see it even though it's not that great.
 
Yeah I wrote stories and poems with Baby Luigi in them for creative writing.

Also, my 3D modeling class, I used Baby Luigi.

This is actually a regular occurrence btw
 
Quite a lot during elementary and middle school. Talking about video games in general, last year I wrote my final paper for a college course on why video games should be considered art. It's not every day you can quote The 'Shroom on a final project.
 
Oh, right! One of my essays was about how violent video games aren't the root of all evil, as some people believe, and Mario popped up in it.

Funnily enough, one of my teachers totally believed that violent video games cause violence (there's an absolute gem of a quote that I won't reproduce here to keep on topic), so I then wrote an essay on why violent video games are the root of all evil.
 
I've written reviews for Super Mario 3D Land, Mario Kart 7 and Super Mario Advance 3: Yoshi's Island.
 
Duh.

I did this since I was in second grade, although I usually self-restrain myself out of embarrassment.
 
Greg Universe said:
I reviewed Super Mario 64 for one piece of my English Language coursework in Year 12 (age 16 --> 17).
Click to expand...

Wait you were allowed to review a video-game for your coursework, MCD wow i could do that for my coursework as well.
 
Another incident I just remembered: I actually brought in a video tape I recorded of some Super Mario 64 gameplay footage for show and tell way back in 3rd grade.

I remember that as a kid I accidentally discovered the trick where you get hit by a fireball with red health in the Vanish Cap Course, then immediately run into the pit while still on fire - Mario will drown instantly upon respawning in the pool outside because the Power meter is the same as the Air meter in that game; thus when you respawn underwater with zero Power, the game thinks you drowned. I had that in my video and several of the kids in my class who had also played SM64 laughed at it.

I also remember saying to the class "Mario really should stop drop and roll!" when he was running around while on fire losing health.
 
Actually there's been quite a few times where I've made Mario-related projects, though these are all I remember:
  • A Mario fangame running on a modified version of Hello Engine 4, I made it available online a few months after it was submitted as the school project: http://www.marioboards.com/index.php?topic=23561.msg1028846
  • A satire of Nintendo Direct focusing on Mario Kart 8, which was done about a month after said game was released last year. I've been considering uploading it to YouTube but given the nature of the internet I refrained from doing so, and especially now it feels inappropriate after Iwata passed away.
  • An appropriation of Act 1 Scene 1 of Romeo and Juliet which was set up as a deliberately amateurish Gmod video (think Sonic Zombie), where the characters were ragdolls of Toads and Koopalings dragged around by the Physgun. I actually scored pretty well on it because of it's unique execution.
 
I wrote a Koopa mythology story for a "hero's journey" project for English one time in Grade 10, but it was pretty much all OCs and stuff - the setting and species involved were the only Mario canon, and even then, I had to obscure it in case fanfiction wasn't allowed.

Another time, I wrote (and illustrated) a proper fanfiction as a "creative lab report" for Grade 12 biology: Bowser and the Transformation of MM294. Got me a 100% - and my science teacher told me I should be a writer, which is kinda ironic since I wanted to be a scientist (and now I am a scientist, but plan to write fiction in between field seasons once I'm done my post-grad studies, so I guess we were both right?).

BowserMM294.png

Also, rewriting Richard III as a Mario fanfic helped me understand the play a lot more for English class (again, Grade 10) - although the fanfic itself was purely done on my own time and not for marks. I later rewrote other Shakespeare plays we studied in Grades 11 and 12 English class (Hamlet and King Lear, respectively), but both after the fact - although they (and my Romeo & Juliet rewrite that I did unprompted by school) did give me a leg-up when I took a university Shakespeare course that covered all three plays, since I was already pretty familiar with the material. Hell, even my RIII-rewriting-given familiarity came in handy when we studied the prequel history play, Richard II, since I noticed a few parallels that no one else in the class did, since they'd never read RIII in-depth, if at all.

Besides direct Mario stuff, years of writing fanfiction and editing the wiki have also given me a lot of practice for writing school stuff too, and editing draft papers for my lab mates, and whatnot.
 
In my Music 101 class last semester, we were asked to give examples of music that each fit one of the five types of musical texture. I used the Super Mario Bros. castle theme as representative of biphonic music.
 
During science class, I drew and cut paper Goombas to demonstrate scientifically what the children of a Brown Male Goomba and a Pink Female Goomba could look like.
 
I could imagine that since there are more brown than pink Goombas, pink would most likely be recessive, so there would be a 75% chance of a brown kid, and 25% chance of a pink kid.

Did I get that right?
 
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