Trying Labor Logs for a Game Design Course Final Project

I have been teaching introductory game design for years, and my students have always had to do some kind of multi-week final project. Each week, I ask them to give a status report on their progress. Most semesters, this has to include some form of playtesting, and in some semesters, I have also allowed alternative work for when the students want a break. Throughout the whole time, I reminded the students that they were being graded on process and not product. No one can guarantee that creative endeavor such as original game design will result in a good product, but a student can show that they have learned and followed an appropriate process for mitigating risks.

One of the perennial problems with this approach was that it was pretty easy for students to get equal credit for doing vastly different quality of work. Often, it would be clear from the presentation that nothing substantial was done in the intervening week, but in the absence of objective criteria, I rarely pressed this. The few cases where I did give only partial credit for the week's progress were so overt that no student ever pushed back on it. As a systems designer, though, I never liked this hole in my course plan. Call it an exploit, if you will.

Several months ago, I became aware of Asao Inoue's work on labor-based grading. His stated goal is to improve equity and inclusion in the writing classroom, and his approach was to use adapt concepts of contract-based grading where the only metric for success is labor—that is, meaningful effort on task. I read only a portion of his book, which made it clear that he and I have different goals. However, I did enjoy reading about the implementation of his philosophy: students track their work in a convenient Google Sheets spreadsheet. The sheet does some automatic computation for them and provides affordances for reflection.

I have been working on the final project specification for my game design class, and I just published a draft for student review this morning. It includes a reference to a sample labor log based on Inoue's template. The columns I used are as follows:

• Date
• Start Time
• Duration (minutes)
• Primary Activity: one of Design, Playtesting, Documentation, Research, and Collaboration
• Location
• Engagement: one of Very High, High, Medium, Low, and Very Low
• Mood
• Notes

I also have a computed column—Week—which uses the course calendar to determine the week of the project (1–5) corresponding to the date. 

There is a sense in which the creditable labor is just the duration, but I like the idea of including some of the extra pieces, such as Primary Activity, Location, Engagement, and Mood. I haven't come up with a final exam plan for the class yet, but I will likely have a question that asks students explicitly to reflect on the patterns they see in their logs.

The spreadsheet uses a pivot table to tally the accumulated duration for each week and present it in a bar chart. If I had more time, I would like to annotate the bar chart with the grade cutoffs that I have written up in the project plan. That said, I think some visualization is better than none.

I am eager to see if a requirement to track labor on the project has any impact on the observed quality of students' weekly progress. Of course, the shift from in-person presentations to discussion board posts is probably a more significant variable here, but I'll keep an open mind. You can expect me to share more thoughts about the labor logs here on the blog toward the end of the semester.