I do enjoy teaching my introduction to game design class, and partnering with Minnetrista through the Immersive Learning program is always a treat. I want to capture a few thoughts here before the Fall semester disappears in a haze of planning for Spring.
Three things that went well
I still like following Schreiber's online Game Design Concepts book. Despite its age, which means that it doesn't have examples that resonate with the students nor touch on more modern phenomena like MOBAs, the fundamental ideas in it are good. You also can't beat the price. I have two new books here that I will flip through soon, but I continue to be impressed by how well Schreiber's online massive teaching experiment has held up.
The transition to a larger class size was not as bad as I feared. I love to teach the class in a manner that has everyone putting posters up on the wall for discussion, but there were too many students for that. The exercises had to move to other formats. I don't think it was as good, honestly, but it was also not so bad.
Having students track their time in their final project using labor logging was much smoother this year than last. Regular readers may recall that, last year, I tried to combine design logs and labor logs, and this confused the students at both the logistical and the epistemological level. This year, it was much clearer whether students were putting in the time being asked of them for the final project. As usual, the projects were graded on process rather than product, and putting effort in is an important part of the process (he says, as he writes his blog post rather than working on his side project).
Three things that could be improved
I am sure I have said this before, but I need to find ways to help students better integrate the first half of the semester into the projects of their second half. The final exam asks the students to connect some of the dots, and it's obvious from their answers that they are doing post hoc reasoning: they talk about these final projects using terms from the reading that never came up in their design logs or presentations. Put another way, I think it's fair to say that most of the student projects would be exactly the same with or without the studies from the first half of the semester. I need to get them reflecting about these ideas in a more structured way, perhaps by adding some additional writing or discussion assignments.
Compounding the issue above is an observation that shocked me early this semester: I don't think I've ever had a class with worse reading comprehension skills. The students and I talked about this more than once during the semester, how they did not understand simple reading assignments. This runs into a fundamental problem with being a university professor: it's almost impossible to distinguish between cannot and won't. That is, if they can read for comprehension but are choosing not to, then that is their problem, but if they cannot read for comprehension, then I have a responsibility to them to scaffold this better. Seeing how poor college students' reading skills are, it makes me wonder if I need to design some interventions here. For example, in my draft Spring CS222 course plans, I am requiring students to take notes while reading and then write summaries of those notes; I think the very notion of taking notes while reading is foreign to them, but I am hopeful that this will bear fruit.
Given the confusion around the tasks in the first half of the semester, it's also possible that allowing resubmission would help. Many students got fundamental things wrong around the basic theories, but very few students are motivated to actually correct these misunderstandings, opting instead to charge forward with muck in their eyes. I'd rather not have an exponential increase in the number of things I have to grade, but on the other hand, I also want them to understand these theories so that they can apply them in their own work and in looking at their classmates' work.
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