Happy Accident Studio and Canning Heroes: Reflecting on the Spring 2019 Immersive Learning Project

It was a great semester in my Spring Game Studio class. I had more applicants than ever before, thanks in part to recruiting assistance from the Office of Immersive Learning. It made it harder to select a team, but it also demonstrated the demand for this kind of experience. I ended up accepting six Computer Science majors, one Music Media Production major, two Animation majors, one Journalism Graphics major, and one English major with a Computer Science minor.

This class worked with Minnetrista in the second semester of a two-semester sequence. They inherited a paper prototype that was selected by me and our primary contact at Minnetrista, George Buss, the Director of Experience and Education. The specific prototype was inspired by Cooking Mama and involved players preparing and cooking foods related to Minnestrista's herb garden and Farmer's Market. The Spring class was able to take this project in connection with the renovation of the historic Oakhurst Home, which is where the original recipes of the Ball Blue Book were developed.

The end result of this work is Canning Heroes, which is a cooperative game for 1-4 players. It is designed to be played on a large touch screen, and our partners at Minnetrista are currently working on the logistics of installation in the Oakhurst home. The source code is available on GitHub, and the executable can be downloaded from itch.io. This is my first time releasing anything on itch.io, and I was pleased with how easy it was to post the game and add student collaborators to the project.

The students dubbed themselves "Happy Accident Studio," which is an homage to Internet-culture icon Bob Ross, who recorded many of his famous painting shows in Muncie right on Minnetrista's campus. I am very pleased with the work done by Happy Accident Studio. Like the best of my immersive learning teams, they were able to learn quickly how to work together and hit stride about ten weeks into the semester. This allowed us to make the necessary revisions in the tail end of the semester to really make the game shine. I think Canning Heroes is the most polished product to come out of my immersive learning classes, and I am hopeful that it will be installed at Minnetrista for public consumption.

Happy Accident Studio was a good team by any metric. They had their flaws as any team will, but overall, they really came to understand what multidisciplinary collaboration means and why it is necessary for this kind of risky and creative work. They struggled with accountability, as student teams often do. They had great eureka moments, particularly around playtesting and code quality. It turns out that except for two seniors, the rest of the team was juniors. This means they will be around next year, and it makes me wonder if we can make some hay while the sun shines.

This was the second immersive learning team I have mentored who have used Unreal Engine 4 for their projects, the previous one being last Spring's Fairy Trails by Guy Falls Down Studio. There was one team member from Spring 2018 who was able to join again this semester, and it was good to have another voice with some experience in the room. He and two others had done some work with UE4 before, and they were enough to seed the learning experience for everyone else. Once again, I was generally happy with how quickly students were able to learn the tools of the engine, particularly Blueprint programming. The team got up and running quickly, and the mistakes they make—such as poor functional decomposition or bad naming practices—are general code quality problems that dog all novices. That is, there was nothing lost by using Blueprint, and much to be gained. Also, whereas Fairy Trails was written entirely in UMG with an enormous amount of effort going toward platform support, Canning Heroes makes better use of the UE4 platform, even though it's entirely "flat" using Paper2D.

Reflections on Student Assessment

Two stories from this semester have me thinking about whether I want to change my student evaluation strategy in future immersive learning projects. This team experienced many of the common successes and failures during the semester, but these two stories stand out in my memory.

First, there was an artist who wanted to create tutorial animations for the game. Her instinct was to create them in After Effects so that then we could import them into the engine. I suggested that, instead, she learn to create the animations in-engine. The tutorial was already using assets that we had in the game, and if the animation were done using keyframes and tweening in-engine, then anyone could tweak them as necessary, for example if the assets or timing needed to be changed (both of which happened, of course). By contrast, if she had created the animations using her familiar tools, any change would require going back to After Effects and repeating the render and import process, decreasing the number of people who could make the change while increasing the bus factor. To this student's credit, she jumped right in, and within a few hours was as adept with creating in-engine animations of 2D assets as anyone else who had been using UE4 for months. In our final retrospective meeting, she brought this up as a great learning outcome of the course: that there are times to use familiar tools and times to learn new tools, and not to be afraid of either.

The second story is not quite so positive. Our music major was de facto audio lead for the team, being in charge of both original compositions and sound effects. Several times during the semester, I encouraged her to do integration work, following the value of interdisciplinary collaboration and multidisciplinary pairing that is explicit in the methodology. However, even at the end of the semester, her approach was to upload files to the server and then step aside: she could not complete the loop of creating a new sound, putting it in the game, and evaluating it. A related story is that throughout development, many team members desired to randomize the sound effects. Again, I encouraged the team generally to look into UE4 support for this, but it was never pursued. It turns out that just after the game was complete, I watched an archived UE4 livestream that prompted me to look more into the audio system myself, and I was crestfallen to see that what the team wanted could be done with a single node of sound cue. I am certain that, had this student shown the ambition of the artist from the first story, we would have a much better aural experience in the game today.

Reflecting on these stories made me wonder whether there was some kind of more formalized incentive that I could use to nudge the students toward manifesting the attitudes and behaviors I desire for them. Several years ago I looked into KPIs as an industry practice that I could adopt in the studio to maintain project authenticity, but my investigations at the time led me to conclude that the timeframe of KPIs doesn't match conventional course structure. Regardless of my pedagogic choices, I am still locked in a three credit-hour class that meets three times a week for fifteen weeks, which doesn't seem to have the breadth required for Google-style KPIs. However, I have also recently been tinkering with specifications grading, particularly toward the goal that grading criteria become unambiguous. At least in theory, removing ambiguity from the grading scheme should help students plan their actions prudently.

The alternative idea that crossed my mind, which I share here in part as an excuse to explore it further, is paths for team members. "Paths" at least is the word that came to mind, informed I suspect by my anticipation of the new Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Core Set, but alternatives might be "roles" or "quests." Keep in mind that I manage the team using a philosophical model of team ownership inspired by agile practices. That means everyone owns everything: anyone can work on art, sound, story, programming, UI, and so on. Occasionally I have teams where one aspect of the game requires a lead who approves work in that area, but that's always in response to dysfunctional team members. Most of the time, I can get students on board with the idea of total team ownership and its concomitant responsibilities.

Paths might offer a concrete way to inform students about expected behaviors, potentially annotating them with incentives (that is, grades). We might start with something like Path of the Novice, which would include incentives for reading the team methodology document, getting accounts set up on Slack and whatnot, putting something on version control. From there, maybe one could branch out into:

• Path of the Artist: create an asset, put it in version control, and integrate it into the game.
• Path of Code: conduct a code review of someone else's work; have your work subject to code review.
• Path of Quality: run playtesting sessions for the game, documenting the results
• Path of the Robot: automate the game build using continuous integration 

Obviously, these are just off the top of my head. Perhaps students could choose a path each two-week iteration and provide evidence at the end about whether they met their goals. Perhaps it really needs levels of achievement. The clear problem that I can see is that it might constrain people in a way that total team ownership is designed not to: it may trick a team member into not contributing what the team needs at some critical point because it's "not their job" (i.e. not on their path). Maybe, then, the result of this reflection is that all I really need is a simpler rule: everyone needs to be able to integrate and test their work. Unfortunately, that really devolves into the existing rule, "Follow the methodology," which is missed by a subset of team members. 

This whole discussion of how to manage future projects has to be framed by Price's Law. I learned a year or two ago that there's a general rule that half the work is done by a square root of the team. It seems that this has strong implications for a group like my immersive learning class. Which disciplines are represented under the square root limit can strongly influence the direction the project can go. Yet, at the end of the semester, I still have to assign grades, and they should be done as fairly as possible. It's not the goal, then, to ensure that everyone produces equal outcomes, but rather than their work is fairly assessed.

What's Next

I've been doing the two-course sequence of immersive learning game development projects since Fall 2012, but I'm taking a little detour in 2019-2020. I received approval from my department to offer my game design class as a special topics class for CS majors and minors in the Fall, so I'm going to try that instead of teaching it as an Honors Colloquium. What I would like to do, as I wrote about two weeks ago, is try to transform my game design course into a regular CS course, which would make it much more sustainable. Fall's plan is set, then, but Spring is still up in the air. As I mentioned above, I would like to take advantage of the fact that I will have more students than ever who have experience with game design and development, but it will be a little while before I can determine what shape that will take.

The studio helps students succeed in other classes

I had the final formal meeting with my Spring 2019 Game Studio class today, and we conducted a final retrospective in a format similar to the one from Spring 2016: we annotated a timeline with details about what was learned and how we felt about it.

One of the most unexpected comments in the conversation was about how the studio class helped students succeed in their other classes. Many students agreed that they came to campus MWF for our 9 o'clock studio meetings, and since they were already on campus, they attended their other classes. They were quite explicit that if they did not have the studio, they would have skipped class much more often. I don't remember this phenomenon ever coming up in the studio before.

However, they also mentioned that their work in other classes often took a back seat to their motivated focus on the studio project, but hey, at least I got them to show up.

Two missing specifications in HCI

I finished grading my students' final projects for the Spring 2019 HCI class (CS445, used to be CS345). Before the start of the semester, I wrote about how I would try specifications grading in the course. After the afternoon of grading, I realize that I missed two important specifications. I will share them here so that I have a better chance of remembering when planning Fall's class, since I've been assigned to teach the course again.

I should have had a specification requiring all non-trivial processing to be done off of the event thread. This is, of course, a requisite for any kind of multi-threaded UI programming. I specifically chose a data source that would require handling slow load times and long processing times so that my students could practice this technique. I developed a sample project in the first half of the semester based around this common practice, and I explained to them why it was important. However, I neglected to have a specification about it. Three hours before the final project was due, I had a student ask for some last-minute troubleshooting. He said that he added a spinner while some images loaded, but it wasn't showing up. Of course, it wasn't showing up because he was loading the image on the event thread. I showed him (again) the example from earlier in the semester and explained (again) why this pattern was necessary. From their final technical presentations, it was clear that he was the only person in the class of roughly twenty students who understood this crucial point. I believe this is an instance of the old standard motto: if it's important, make it worth points. I simply missed it in my specifications.

The other specification deals with acceptance testing. There are two relevant specifications in the evaluation plan, one at B-level and one at A-level. Specification B.5.R says that the final report " describes the methods by which the solution was evaluated," and A.2.R says that "The documented solution evaluation includes both quantitative and qualitative elements that explicitly align with this semester's readings." The B-level specification is designed to be broad: you can earn a B on the project by doing any kind of acceptance testing. The A-level specification is designed to be more focused: do a mixed methods evaluation based on a theory we studied this semester. None of the five teams explicitly aligned their evaluations with the semester's readings. This didn't stop two of the groups from marking that specification as complete in their respective checklists, casting serious doubt on the implicit claim that they had conducted the required self-assessment for which the checklist is a result. (Perhaps, then, I need to add more rigor to the self-assessment itself, requiring them to link their claim to the artifacts.)

The problem with the acceptance testing actually goes much deeper than dishonest claims of completion. Among those who conducted any kind of acceptance testing, there was no evidence of their having learned anything from the assigned readings and exercises relating to Steve Krug's and Jakob Nielson's theories. Instead, they followed ad hoc approaches that were poorly designed and yield unreliable results. They did actually use quantitative and qualitative approaches, in keeping with A.2.R, but they did not do these well. For example, many groups asked questions like "What did you think of the application?" and then reported "3/6 users say they liked it." I pointed out in my feedback that 50% of users claiming they liked it is different from 50% of users liking it. More importantly, "liking" the application was not one of our design goals: we were designing systems to be used. Yet, only one of the groups conducted a task-based evaluation, where the user was asked to accomplish a goal using their system. Task-based evaluation is what I expected, and task-based evaluation is what I wanted. However, I wanted the students to realize that this kind of evaluation was the right choice, so I left the specification open to other options. The other options were demonstrably worse. Hence, in the future, and particularly in this introductory HCI course, I should just require them to follow the best practice rather than give them the choice to shoot themselves in the proverbial feet.

I have to wonder if the students would have spontaneously met these criteria if they had taken notes during our discussions

A student's Eureka Moment with game state analysis

I was in the studio the other day with a student working on redesigning part of the gameplay implementation on this semester's immersive learning project. Incidentally, it's been an amazing semester for this team, but I've had other writing tasks eat up the time I would otherwise have been blogging about it. In any case, he told me that he had a solution in mind that would require using two booleans. I stopped him and pointed out that once we have more than one boolean, we need clearly enumerated states. This is good practice generally and it is also a rule in the Gamemakin UE4 Style Guide that we're following.

I took the student over to the whiteboard and we began analyzing the interactions involved, resulting in this diagram:

We talked through a few scenarios. When I was convinced that he understood the analysis, we went back to the workstation and I showed him how to create an enumerated type with three values. Then, we went into Blueprint and looked at the events. I demonstrated how we could switch on the new enumeration that we had defined and use that to encode the logic from the diagram on the whiteboard. At first he was kind of quiet and seemed to be thinking about the problem at the source code level. Then, around the time we added the logic of the second trigger, he spun around and proclaimed something like, "Oh! That diagram becomes the code!" It was a wonderful example of that eureka moment when the pieces click and, as a result, he became a more powerful developer. Now he has a new tool in his toolbelt, and I can work with him to understand how to recognize when the problem affords using such a tool.

"Who Would YOU Rather Work With?" A classroom game show for my HCI class

On Tuesday last week, my HCI class gave their informal reports for the first iteration of their final projects. I neglected to post any real guidelines about the presentation, and so it was ad hoc. We did have two guests in the room, though, one being an expert user for the projects and the other being a software development professional. There were several points in the students' presentations when I cringed at how they presented their status and ideas. I considered for a while how to address this, and I ended up coming up with a classroom game show called Who would YOU rather work with?

This is a rhetoric game along the lines of The Metagame and CARD-tamen. There are two teams, each of which sends up a player for the round. The two contestant are shown a pair of fictional quotations, and based on these, must argue for who they would rather hire onto a team. We alternated which team went first, and each player had 30 seconds to make their cases. The winner was determined by popular vote. Even though a team could just vote for their own representative, I think the students understood that it should be a fair vote.

The original idea for the game was Is it User-Centered... or Not?, but I realized as I started working on the game systems that user-centeredness was only part of the equation. More of the problems were with students' rhetoric than with their technical or procedural approaches, and hence my choice to make this a rhetoric game.

We played the game last week Thursday. I had the students count off by twos in order to shuffle them around, so they would not be on a team with the person they usually sat with. The two teams named themselves The One Before Two and Los Dos. (Important note: The One Before Two insisted that the short name of their team was TOBT, pronounced "tot" with a silent "B".)

Here are the prompts that I gave them:

1.
"The images take a long time to load, so the user just has to learn to wait."
or
"We will show a spinner to signify to the user that the system is still working."

2.
"JavaFX is a pain. It's really fiddly."
or
"We thought we knew the JavaFX API better than we actually did. We talked about it and identified our main misconceptions, and we are working to overcome them."

3.
"We were all really busy so we did not work on that feature."
or
"We documented that feature as a user story to consider for the next iteration."
[or, in a bonus round, "That feature is out of scope."]

4.
"Git kept on destroying our files. It doesn't do what it is supposed to do."
or
"We had problems managing version control, and one of our impediments is our own understanding. We have prioritized finding the root cause so that it doesn't happen again."

5.
"We are making this application using Java and JavaFX because Dr. Gestwicki provided an example with these."
or
"We have analyzed our target population's needs and have chosen a development platform that allows us to deploy a solution that meets their needs."

6.
"We did a lot of work that you cannot see exposed through the UI right now, but it will be incorporated into the next iteration."
or
"Our source code provides the simplest possible solution for this iteration that maintains our standards of quality."

7.
"We are not sure if this is an SRP [Single Responsibility Principle] violation or not."
or
"We have evaluated our code for compliance with SRP and, where we were unsure, we consulted with the professor to evaluate the structure."

8.
"We know that what we have planned for iteration 2 is going to solve our problem."
or
"We learned from iteration 1 to help us improve our product and processes for iteration 2."

9.
"We based our work on Dr. Gestwicki's example."
or
"We built a solution for this problem based on our users' specific needs."

The last one is quite a bit like #5, but that was in part to handle the case where everyone actually showed up to class and would get a turn. Of course, not everyone showed up to class, so we had enough questions that some people got to answer two.

One of the students hypothesized out loud, in round three or four, that the bottom answers were always "right." I pointed out that this was a rhetoric game: there was no objectively right answer, but rather a challenge to persuasively argue your position. Once the game was over, I explained to them that there was indeed a pattern, of course. The top item was more or less what I heard people say during their presentations, but the bottom is what I would have like to hear instead. This caused a murmur in the crowd as they considered what this means. It gave us a good excuse to talk about how you present yourself when applying for a job or internship: that the applications will be sorted into two piles, and you want to make sure you end up in the "Let's talk to this person" pile.

For the most part, students argued that they would rather work with the second person on each slide, using the kinds of arguments you would expect. The statements on the bottom tend to show capacity for reflection, eagerness to learn from mistakes, honesty, professionalism, accountability, and user-centered rather than developer-centered. However, it was not the case that everyone argued for the bottom. On #3, a student argued that the person on top was simply being honest, not really making excuses, while the person on the bottom was being political to the point of dishonesty.

In the end, it was a close game, with TOBT winning 5 to 4 over Los Dos. I think the students appreciated the interactivity and how everyone got a chance to speak their piece. When it was all over, I walked through the slides again to talk through some of the issues that came up, so I guess they didn't really get a reprieve from hearing me lecture to them. However, I think they felt like they had some skin in the game now, since they had already shared their thoughts about each issue.

Mapping Introductory Game Design to CS2013

Regular readers may be wondering why I was looking at the learning objectives of CS2013, the ACM/IEEE recommendations for Computer Science curricula. The answer is that I am in the process of putting together a proposal for a new Introduction to Game Design elective in my department.

For the past several years, I have been teaching an Honors Colloquium on Game Design in the Fall semester. This has been very rewarding, but it is only made possible by internal funding from the Immersive Learning program and the good will of both the Honors College and the Computer Science Department. I believe it is time to formalize this class and bring it into my home department. This has a few implications, one being that I have to explain to my colleagues the relationship between Game Design and Computer Science. I suspect that they, like many outside the discipline, have never carefully considered the distinction between Game Design and Game Programming—the latter of which is an elective that I teach here. If I can get their approval for the course, it will allow me to build a more reliable pipeline of prepared students, which means we can explore more ambitious game development projects.

One of the ways I am planning to make the course appropriate as a departmental elective is to give it a one-semester programming prerequisite. While it's true that this will allow us to do a little programming in the game design course (such as in Twine), primarily I want to be able to use programming as a lens for considering system analysis. One of the real values of learning to program is that it teaches you to think through complex problems and serialize the steps of a solution. This is, essentially, writing the rules of a game. It's something that I've seen some of my past non-CS Honors students struggle with, and it's a skill that I see good programmers take for granted.

That's sufficient background for me to get back to the CS2013 mapping. Below is a list of the knowledge areas and topics that I see as being covered in an Introductory Game Design course that would be housed in a Department of Computer Science. With each topic, I have indicated whether the ACM/IEEE recommendations include minimum contact hours and at which tier.

• Human-Computer Interaction:
• HCI/Foundations [4 Core-Tier1 hours]
• HCI/Designing Interactions [4 Core-Tier2 hours]
• HCI/User-Centered Design and Testing [Elective]
• HCI/Collaboration and Communication [Elective]
• HCI/Design-Oriented HCI [Elective]
• Platform-Based Development:
• PBD/Introduction [Elective]
• Software Engineering:
• SE/Software Project Management [2 Core-Tier2 hours]
• Systems Fundamentals
• SF/State and State Machines [6 Core-Tier1 hours]
• Social Issues and Professional Practice
• SP/Professional Ethics [2 Core-Tier1 hours, 2 Core-Tier2 hours]
• SP/Intellectual Property [2 Core-Tier1 hours]
• SP/Professional Communication [1 Core-Tier1 hour]

For most of these, the course could cover all the core hours. For SE/Software Project Management, which I wrote about last week, team-based projects in introductory game design could hit the objectives as well as anything else, despite the products being analog rather than digital. The only place where the proposed course would clearly not fully satisfy the recommendations is SF/State and State Machines. These provide useful tools for describing the behavior of games, but we would not use a rigorous form of them and probably not spend more than an hour on their explicit treatment. It may be worth noting that some past offerings of my game design class provided an optional exercise with the formal design tool Machinations, but no one ever took me up on that.

It may be worth noting that all the core hours of those objectives above are covered elsewhere in the curriculum, although not all in required courses. HCI/Designing Interactions topic is only met in the HCI elective course, and this deficiency was noted in my department's recently-written self-study. The SE topic is ostensibly covered in the senior capstone, and the SP in our required one credit-hour professionalism class. However, I think it's worth repeating aphorism that it doesn't matter what we cover in the curriculum: it matters what our students uncover.

Of course, introductory game design primarily is teaching game design. This mapping exercise is to help me frame this work for any potential skeptics in the department. The result of this exercise belongs in the Course Rationale portion of the master syllabus. My next step is to define the learning objectives and assessments for the course proposal, which defines more clearly what the course is about. Here, I can focus more on fundamental principles of design, which I was disappointed to see are not directly addressed in CS2013. 

Questioning the value of CS2013

I recently had cause to re-read the ACM/IEEE CS2013 curriculum recommendations. This document is created by a large committee of content experts to provide guidance to Computer Science undergraduate programs. On one hand, it's a useful articulation of the body of knowledge that constitutes "Computer Science". On the other hand, well, let's take a closer look.

The CS2013 document breaks down Computer Science into knowledge areas such as Discrete Structures, Human-Computer Interaction, Operating Systems, and Software Engineering. Within the Software Engineering (SE) topic is a section called SE/Software Project Management. The section contains "2 core Tier2 hours", which means there are two recommended minimum contact hours on the topic, and they should be in a non-introductory course. For those who don't know the higher education jargon, "contact hours" means "students and faculty together in a formal meeting" such as a lecture. According to US financial aid legislation, and therefore according to practically every domestic institution of higher education, a student is expected to engage in two additional effort hours for each contact hour. For example, a student is expected to read, study, or work on homework for two hours for each one-hour lecture.

The core topics contained within SE/Software Project Management are as follows:

• Team participation
• Team processes including responsibilities for tasks, meeting structure, and work schedule
• Roles and responsibilities in a software team
• Team conflict resolution
• Risks associated with virtual teams (communication, perception, structure)
• Effort Estimation (at the personal level)
• Risk (cross reference IAS/Secure Software Engineering)
• The role of risk in the lifecycle
• Risk categories including security, safety, market, financial, technology, people, quality, structure and process

That's a lot of topics to cover in two hours of lecture and four hours of studying, but I could see it being all combined into a breakneck chapter of a Software Engineering textbook. Note that there are additional elective topics within SE/Software Project Management, but we won't consider those for this discussion.

Part of the ostensible value of CS2013 is that it doesn't just provide a topic list for each section of a knowledge area: it also provides learning outcomes. These are classified in a system inspired by Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain, so each outcome can be at the level of Familiarity, Usage, or Assessment. These are defined on page 34 of CS2013, and we can summarize them as basic awareness, ability to deploy knowledge concretely, and being able to consider from multiple viewpoints—as one would infer from the nomenclature. These, then, are the learning outcomes for SE/Software Project Management, as listed on page 177 of CS2013:

1. Discuss common behaviors that contribute to the effective functioning of a team. [Familiarity] 
2. Create and follow an agenda for a team meeting. [Usage]
3. Identify and justify necessary roles in a software development team. [Usage]
4. Understand the sources, hazards, and potential benefits of team conflict. [Usage]
5. Apply a conflict resolution strategy in a team setting. [Usage]
6. Use an ad hoc method to estimate software development effort (e.g., time) and compare to actual effort required. [Usage]
7. List several examples of software risks. [Familiarity]
8. Describe the impact of risk in a software development lifecycle. [Familiarity]
9. Describe different categories of risk in software systems. [Familiarity]

It's pretty clear to me that it's impossible to meet those nine objectives in two contact hours and four out-of-class work hours. Even if we assume that each student is perfectly capable of independent learning and studying, the time required to make any meaningful knowledge about these items is certainly greater than the recommended hours. I recognize that I am making assertions here and not arguments. In an earlier draft of this post, I tried a more rigorous argument, but I realized that a true skeptic could always counterclaim that they could meet these goals within the timeline. The real difference would not be the time required but our mutually exclusive definition of what it means to meet a learning objective.

It seems to me, then, that there are only two ways this could be approved by a committee. The first is that the committee has no functional understanding of contemporary learning theory. If that were the case, then why should anyone take their recommendations for curricula seriously? The second option is negligence, that the committee as a whole knew better, but they did not verify whether their recommendations and the learning objectives actually align. If that's the case, then why should anyone take their recommendations seriously?