CIS 300: Introduction to Computer Game Design

Final Report:
Evaluations

Due: Saturday, May 10th at 11:59pm

In order to receive a grade for this course, you must turn in a final report. This report will be like the two-week reports in that you will be looking back on your work on the game and evaluating what went right and what went wrong. However, this final report is different in two important ways. First of all, you are to look back at the entire semester, and not just the last two weeks. In addition, every group member must submit an different individual report.

The reason for requiring individual reports is that, in the end, we will be assigning individual grades. Therefore, we want to fairly assess the contribution of each team member to the group. In order to do this, we need private peer evaluations. In a peer evaluation, you will write a separate evaluation for each member of the group. That way, every person will have a peer review written about them by every member in the group. For each of you, we will gather all of the peer evaluations your peers have written about you, and then use our best judgement (throw out students with clear personally conflicts, average scores, etc.) to use these values to determine your final grade on the game project (which is 50% your total grade).

In addition to the peer evaluations, we want a course evaluation from you. This does not determine your final grade, but we will not assign you a final grade if we do not get one. The purpose of this evaluation is to get some feedback about the course and determine what can be done better next time. This was Walker White's first time with the course, and it was clearly rough around a few of the edges. We would like to make this course better in the future.

Peer Evaluations

You should write an evaluation for each member of your group including yourself. This will help us understand whether you think that what your teammates wrote about you is fair or not. How you format the evaluation is up to you. However, they should all have the following format.

First of all, you should provide a short answer to each of the following questions about the person you are evaluating:

  1. From what you have seen, what are this member's greatest strengths?
  2. From what you have seen, what are this member's greatest weaknesses?
  3. Would you ever work with this person again? Why or why not?

Next, you should assign that person a letter grade (A+ through F) in each of the following areas:

Participation
This member consistently and punctually showed up to meetings (in allowance to their schedule), attended milestone presentations and work days, and contributed to discussions within the group.
Focus
This member stayed focused and task-oriented on what they had to do. They were well aware of their milestones and two-week breakdowns, and they consistently met deadlines.
Quantity of Work
This member contributed an amount of work that either met or exceeded the expectations for the team. In other words, they "carried their own weight".
Quality of Work
This work produced by this member was of a quality that either met or exceeded the expectations for the other team. The member was knowledgable (enough) in the develop role allocated, and did not have to be reassigned because of poor quality work.
Attitude
This member respected other ideas and opinions within the group. It was a pleasure to work with this person.
Productivity
This member contributed to the productive and motivated atmosphere of the team. This person consistently took initiative to work on the project and get things done, even without being asked.
Overall Grade
Based on all of the items that you have evaluated above, assign an overall grade to this team member.

You should also feel free to include whatever additional comments that you would like to make regarding this evaluation.

Course Evaluation

The following short answer questions are intended to get some feedback on the course itself. Whatever answers you could give to these would be most appreciated.

Lectures

One of the things that we tried to do this semester is to add more content in the lectures, that had existed in the past versions of the course. Some of this appeared to work; others not so well. The first three questions deal with this issue.

1. How helpful were the lectures towards helping you with the project?
If they were not helpful, was it because they were presented too late (such as the lectures on physics) or they did not cover the material that you needed to know?
2. What level of detail is best for the lectures?
Do you learn more from lectures that provide you with solutions, or from lectures that just tell you what the basic problem statement is?
3. What material would you like added to the lectures?
Software engineering and design patterns are something that we are looking at for next year. We are also looking at a lecture on user testing. What other topics would you like to see.
4. What material should be removed or scaled back?
Adding new material comes at a price; there are only so many lecture days. If we add new material, what can be scaled back or eliminated from the course?

Case Studies

Case studies are an important part of the course which were very hard to handle this semester. The department has requested that the instructor only be in class 3 days a week (with possible exceptions for the milestone evaluations). This makes it possible for someone to teach the class even if they have other responsibilities and do not do games all the time. That way, the department can keep the course going even as instructors come and go.

It is for that reason that the case studies were farmed out to the TAs. I know there were problems with this, and I am trying to figure what to do to fix this.

5. Did you every get anything out of the case studies of commercial games?
At the beginning of the semester, we looked at various commercial and independent games. Was this useful, and if not, what could we have done to make this more interesting and relevant?
6. Did you get anything out of the peer workshops?
In the second half of the semester, we switched from commercial games to your games. Was this at all useful? Did it matter if the game being discussed was yours (e.g. it was only useful if it was your game, or the other way around)?
7. Should the case studies be structured or unstructured?
At the beginning of the semester, the TAs were given only high level direction for the case studies. When we switched to workshops they were given much more explicit scripts. Did this make a deference? Why or why not?
8. Is it better to play the games or to talk about them?
It was hard to get people to play the games in the case studies. In the workshops, we primarily discussed the games, but Section 1 did play some of the games in the final workshops. Is it necessary to play the game in order to talk about it meaningfully? Should we always make a group bring their game (even if it is just a prototype) to a workshop for people to play it?

Communication Labs

The communication labs are a large part of the technical writing credit. Running these was difficult this semester. We had large groups, but we could not break it up by section because of availability of instructors from the Communication Department. As a result the communciation labs were really large.

9. Did you every get anything out of the communication labs?
Obviously we needed to give you some idea on what to do with the documents. But did you get anything out of classtime that could not be done on a webpage? Was this a problem with class size or just the format of the labs?
10. Is class wide discussion better than individual groups?
The last communication lab, on postmortems, was a class discussion that I controlled at the whiteboard. During the other days, we broke up into small groups and discussed things that way. Which was more productive?
11. What type of stuff would you like more of in the communication labs?
In giving your answer, keep in mind that splitting the class into different sections may still not be possible.

Scheduling

Finally, there have been some rumblings about the date of Showcase. I picked the date that I did because it is tradition, and it is the way that my predecessors handled Showcase. However, I am somewhat flexible. There are also some issues with the class time that might need to be addressed.

12. Is it important to meet the same time every day?
The class still needs to meet 4 times a week (5 times, the first 4 weeks). But does it need to meet at the same time every day? We could avoid meeting during lunch if the case studies/lab were held at one time and the lectures were held at another.
13. When should Showcase be held?
Keep in mind that it needs to be held early enough so that people are still on campus to attend it. However, if it is too early, then you will have less time to finish the game.

Submission

You should submit two files to CMS by Saturday, May 10th at 11:59pm:

  • The file courseeval, which contains your evaluation of the course using the template provided above.
  • The file peerevel, which includes your evaluation of all of the members of your group including yourself. Again, use the guidelines above to produce your evaluations.
Each of your submissions may either be a text file (txt), a Microsoft Word file (doc), or a PDF file (pdf).