I tried to keep what was good about Spring's section while remedying some of the items that I found problematic or confusing. The overall structure of the course is the same as before: we will spend a few weeks on background readings and regular exercises, focusing our attention on Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things. We will be moving from three meetings per week to two, so I adjusted the readings and assignments accordingly. It's a rather aggressive reading schedule from the get-go, which should help the students recognize they need to allocate adequate time. I added a few readings and videos, including Steve Krug's usability testing video from Rocket Surgery Made Easy, a recent Designer vs Developer episode from Google that gives a good overview of design principles (though I take serious issue with the implicit epistemology of that series' title), Jakob Nielsen's "Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users," and Andy Rutledge's series on Gestalt principles of perception.
I have kept the grading scheme essentially as it was, although I added a new required assignment for graduate students. This will help distinguish their work a bit more than it was before during the project section of the course. Grad students will have to choose one out of four options, each having a different theme: scholarly research, software architecture, design principles, and design methods. As before, they will also have an additional set of assignments early in the semester, which give them a crash course in some of the ideas that the undergraduates would have seen in their prerequisite, CS222. Our graduate program has no equivalent course that can be used as a prerequisite for grad students, so these extra assignments help to catch them up to where the undergrads are.
Last time, I used triage grading as the theme of the short project: students had to talk to others who were exposed to triage grading and design something that would help them with the transition. This backfired when many of my students did not take the time to learn triage grading for themselves, and so they were unable to create interventions of any merit. One group even insisted that the best solution was to change triage grading, essentially replacing it with conventional grading; despite repeatedly discussing this with them, they didn't ever seem to understand that this was not within their jurisdiction. Several times during the final project, I referred back to their failures on the triage grading project; some students seemed to be able to take this as a learning experience, but others didn't seem to show any recognition of what went wrong, judging from what they ended up with. Suffice it to say, I am going with a different theme this time: BSU freshmen who do not know local jargon and landmarks. Freshmen are plentiful for use as research subjects, and my students are not themselves freshmen.
About two weeks ago, I set up a partnership with the David Owsley Museum of Art (DOMA), which is really a treasure of Ball State University's campus. My students will go on a tour of the museum early in the semester, and then, after we go through some of the background material and the short project, we will talk to them again about their mission and goals. The students then will have creative freedom to create an original, prototypical software system that explores these themes. They were very happy to have my students accessing their digitized data as well, although it is managed through the university's Digital Media Repository.
Here is where things started to break down. I assumed that my students and I could just get read-only access to the database. They shied away from that and asked if we could work with a dump of the database. I've been going back and forth on emails for the past two weeks now trying to sort this out. To be clear, everyone is very supportive of the idea, but nothing seems to be happening. At this point, I'm awaiting a dump of a database to see what I can do with it, but I don't have an ETA. I've been working pretty consistently all summer, and I'm heading into a family vacation and "taking some time off" mode, so if I don't get my hands on that data soon, I won't have time over the summer to sort it out. The good news is that I found a good back-up plan. Searching the Web for art museums with public APIs, I came across the Digital Public Library of America. They have a nice, open API that seems to aggregate many other data sources. If we cannot get access to DOMA's data, I know we can use DPLA's, at least for the sake of our prototype. If we go this route and a student makes something that really excites DOMA, we can look at stitching it back into their data.
I've copied over the new decorum section from my other two course revisions into this new one. As I wrote about earlier, this section is designed specifically to address some of the frustrations from Spring's HCI course. You can be sure I'll let you know how it all turns out by the time the Fall semester is over, if not before.
That pretty much wraps up my summer course revisions, modulo some potential extra work specifying another mini-project in game programming or tinkering with data sources for HCI. It's been a productive summer so far. I spent a week writing a manuscript for Meaningful Play, which I just found out was accepted, so I look forward to returning to Lansing in October. It needs just a little bit of revision which I will do tomorrow morning or next week. I also am one click away from submitting a grant proposal for a new educational game collaboration. Of course, I started the summer by sinking a lot of time into Collaboration Station and Fairy Trails. I've triaged the former into a holding pattern: although the anonymous authentication feature I needed was finally added to the third-party library we used for multiplayer, the changes to that subsystem require more effort than I am willing to donate. I'd rather spend that time on some new prototype ideas, playing around with Unreal Engine 4.20. I think the next project on the docket, though, will be building some custom cars for Gaslands: that will make it really be a summer vacation.
Thanks for reading!
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