Evie's Weekly Report 2/28/09

What was planned? More documentation, finish merging code. fix the gui problems on windows platform.

What was done? Got the remainder of Josh's work integrated with the tool. Drop down, linked list, super array, etc., now not only exist in the codebase as proof of concepts but are actually present in the dance tool project. Updated the dancetool gui with some image buttons. fixed the blending issues on maya. when she "compiles" she now blends all the animations together... except when instructions are added to existing notes.

Worked with Josh on understanding some of the more difficult to understand classes.

Problems encountered? recursion + unity = very bad. i know i've mentioned this before but testing for logical errors with a recursive solution in unity is truly a nightmare. most languages throw a stack overflow error or something simple like that. Unity crashes, closes itself down, and forcibly removes the class from the project (regardless of how many other classes use it), ultimately destroying any and all functionality of the project until you realize what happened, fix the class(blindly) and reimport the class into the project.

there have been other issues, mostly with the gui and windows.

svn issues as usual. Scott Wood came by to help today, but in a stroke of bad luck, some satellites went down an hour before he got here, rendering him useless until they are back online. unfortunate.

What did you learn this week?Debug.Log(). Joy. now I have console messages, warnings and errors outside Monobehaviour classes. Thanks Josh, for researching this.

What's planned for next week? more proof of concept stuff brought to life. fix the design of dance elements and the algorithm used to resolve the elements into a danceInstruction SuperArray.

Josh has started working on the Project class and has added some documentation on the class into the TDD. This class allows us to create new projects, open existing projects, save projects to uml, etc.

Yoo Shin is working on more GUI problems.

Su Hyung is setting up the new svn. He's also redoing some of the dance moves and reorganizing them.

Try to Squeeze a sandbox paper out of something i've done in the past by sunday.

Hours worked? 28 hours

-Evie
www.eviemakesgames.com

Josh's weekly report from 2/16 - 2/23

What was planned? Implementing the linked list data structure used to create Dances in the tool

What was done? I have been through the code, commenting and understanding the flow of control between each of the classes and carefully documented it. I have also estensively tested the linked list class I recreated and it works (the first one was lost).

Problems encountered? The code-based was larger than I expected. The process of getting the classes figured out has taken much longer than expected has taken alot longer than I wanted it to. Also, I had two tests this week, so that messed up my schedule

What did you learn this week? I learned that it is hard to understand someone else's code, but that is the way it is going to be in the work-force, so I should get used to it

What's planned for next week? Actually getting the Dance's working. Once that it done, it will be easy to save and load Dance's.

Hours worked? ~10 hours

Antoine Campbell Weekly Report 2-23-09

1. What was planned?
*Work on Bunny Generals prototype to make the first puzzle
*Finish a Working Tile Engine Sample

2. What was done?
*Still Working on a Bunny Generals prototype
*Completed the Tile Engine Sample for Bunny Generals, one stop closer!

3. Problems encountered?
*I have no art, so this prototype will use some borrowed art
*I'm realizing this game is going to contain a large numbers of scripts, and
I'm going to need an efficient way to manage this throughout the game.

4. What did you learn this week?
*How to strip down the XNA Tile Engine to its core.
(http://creators.xna.com/en-US/tutorial/roleplayinggametutorial2)
*I cannot draw to save my life, and should not

5. What's planned for next week?
*Hopefully have this first simple puzzle done with some borrowed images
*Update some of the playground websites with Andrea and the other alt. webmaster.

6. Hours worked.
*About 11

Katie's Weekly Report 2/23/2009

1. What was planned?
-Finish Bunny General prototypes
-Get IRB approval for Creativity and Cognition paper study
-Finish Sandbox papedeadline (yay for submission extensions)
-Get study participants
-First session with Citizen Schools

2. What was done?
-Learned how to use RPG Maker VX for prototypes (a change from XP last week)
-Study has been repitched, but still no participants. Professors have all be re-re-emailed
-First session with Citizen Schools was on Thursday
-Discussed the goals of the Creativity and Cognition paper
-Bunny Generals prototypes are underway, and have begun serving their purpose as I've realized my initial plans were far too big.


3. Problems encountered?
-Still no participants for the study
-Citizen Schools provided us with 2 fewer computers and 3 more students than originally promised.
-Had an issue with RPG Maker XP crashing on my machine, had to switch to VX which has some significant differences
-I don't actually focus my ideas as well as I thought I did: Bunny Generals needs a more focused goal if we're going to actually produce a game (prototyping has taught me much) and the Creativity and Cognition paper needs a more focused hypothesis if I'm going to design an effective study.


4. What did you learn this week? (esp. computer science, or anything surprising or
interesting) Be sure to cite any resources you used (e.g. online tutorials, etc).
-RPG Maker VX (http://www.gameskank.net/board/index.php?showtopic=1306, http://en.wordpress.com/tag/rpg-maker-vx-tutorial/)
-The Bunny General idea was too broad, focus should be changed to just sorting algorithms and their time complexities in order to get a more focused, worthwhile game
-CMU has a really amazing Entertainment Technology program with some equally amazing projects (http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/experimentalgameplay/, http://www.etc.cmu.edu/)

5. What's planned for next week?
-Get IRB approval for Creativity and Cognition paper study
-Finish Sandbox paper (yay for submission extensions)
-Get study participants somehow...possibly kidnapping, no...definitely kidnapping
-Second session with Citizen Schools this week, pre-test for CSDTs needed
-Continue research for the Creativity and Cognition paper, look into proper Likert Scale design and game evaluation methods.
-Begin forming a study design for the Creativity and Cognition paper, form a solid hypothesis and determine what data is needed to support this hypothesis.

6. Hours worked.
15

Su Hyung's Weekly Report 02/23/2009

Su Hyung's Weekly Report 02/23/2009

1. What was planned?

- add some code and all of animation from share drive.

- separate maya and max animation.

- fix boundary box.

2. What was done?

- add most of arm animation and all of head, leg animation.

- reinstall mac osx, unity3d, maya8.5

3. problems encountered?

- my unity3d was not working. so I

- reinstalled mac osx

- reinstalled unity3d

- reinstalled maya 8.5

- now my mac pro was installed maya 8.5, but unity3d can not recognize .mb files. I need maya 2008 to read .mb files which I made.

- made all of animation files again because main character pivot location was moved.

4. What did I learn this week?

- If I made some files by using latest Maya, older version Maya never read the files.

- Unity 3d code

- We have mac version unity 3d and windows version unity 3d. now Dancing tool is working well on mac, but It is not working well on windows. It means that we can not work a same project with on different OS.

5.  What's planned for next week?

- we need to change some animation lists because I can not make finger animation, and feet animation. We (I and Evie) will discuss about that.

- fix boundary.

- separate maya and max animation.

6. Hours worked

20 hours

Acey's Weekly Report 2/15 - 2/22

1. What was planned?
Finish the Puzzles.
Look at code.
First tests of puzzles.

2. What was done?
Created the last 4 puzzles.
Rechecked all the puzzles utilizing all the tricks I have learned. I was able to remove steps from over half of the puzzles. I find this very interesting as it strengthens my belief that this game will show strong learning gains especially in the area of optimization and layering.
Saved an image of each of the completed puzzles for use in Outreach.
Downloaded and installed the code base, ran it, and tinkered with it a bit.

3. Problems encountered?
Sadly the planned CSDT part of the outreach had to be pushed back to next week. This was good for the outreach because they took a lot longer to make Catch the Clown than we estimated.

4. What did you learn this week?
As I said earlier I learned that at least I have shown improved skill at solving the puzzles. I was honestly shocked at some of the mistakes I made in early puzzles. The best example of this is making 4 squares mirrored around the x and y axis. This was originally done in 4 steps. The more optimal way to do this is make one large square and divide it into smaller squares using rectangles (3 steps). I have definitely learned the most optimal way of doing something is usually not the easiest or most obvious way. These are lessons that students will definitely be able to transfer over to CSC (I do not know how many algorithms I have seen that are way more complex but perform more optimally).

I also learned that the new improved Bead Loom uses movable and peaceable windows so it should be possible to have 2 windows (one with what the player is doing and one with the goal) open and easily navigatable. In other words it will be able to mimic tabs inside one tab.

5. What's planned for next week?
Prepare a presentation for the Game Lab about my game and showing off the puzzles.

Use the puzzles in outreach with MLK Middle School.

In the code find a way to convert the layer system of the advanced tool into a single 40x40 array representing the current visible beads.
-The layer system in the new bead loom tool is nice but not the design I am working with for the game. Rather than layers of beads it is more challenging and a better representation of basic Computer Science concepts to think of the graph as a 41x41 array. That is when you put a bead on the graph it overwrites the current value in that array slot. The current set up is more of a 3d array with each layer being stacked on top of the 2d array. Therefore I will either need to create a 41 by 41 array that is filled whenever the user takes an action or find a way to convert the current collection of arrays into a single one. This should not be too hard but will take time to track down where everything I need is located within the code.

6. Hours worked.
20

Evies weekly reports

2/16/09

1. What was planned?

Finish merging of projects. Redesign the dance instruction so that different instructions of different elements will also merge and "compile" correctly. Document this design change.

2. What was done?

fixed bugs in dance instructions. sent a report to ITS to request open port. Revised dance tool schedule. Incorporating merge days into our schedule. This time will become a part of the dance tool weekly meetings.

3. Problems encountered?

no browser support. Dance tool will have to be distributed in some other way until the new webplayer is released. Still no merge support. Hard to replicate errors when working on different computers. There's a bug on server, and on my desktop that was not visible on my laptop. I am currently trying to fix this bug. Su Hyung is having trouble with animation. I need to sit down with him and help him understand how animations work.

4. What did you learn this week? (esp. computer science, or anything surprising or interesting) Be sure to cite any resources you used (e.g. online tutorials, etc).

still learning vp-uml.

5. What's planned for next week?

I have two weeks to finish the dancetool before our trial of unity runs out. I'll have to enforce more required dev time. (on thursday or friday). I will try to schedule this time with team members today.

6. Hours worked.

13 hours (not finished with my week yet!)

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02/11/09

Evie's Weekly report

01:25:57 pm, Categories: Uncategorized

1. What was planned?

complete umls and sequence diagrams. fix existing gui bugs. add final functionality. find/fix export bug for web deployment.

2. What was done?

Dance Notes, Dance Nodes, and Dance Instructions have been documented in TDD and UMLs. Associations being added.

Dance Nodes have been revised.

3. Problems encountered?

still having problems with arena. web browser is outdated for new unity beta. Dancetool wont play in browser!!!

4. What did you learn this week? (esp. computer science, or anything surprising or interesting) Be sure to cite any resources you used (e.g. online tutorials, etc).

some problem solving. learned how to use vp-uml. i like it.

5. What's planned for next week?

Dancetool. Hopefully within next week we can start play testing.

6. Hours worked.

20

Su Hyung's Weekly Report. 02/16/09

for 2 weeks

Su Hyung's Weekly Report 2/16/2009

1. What was planned?
- Fix dance tool errors
- fix boundary
- add animation

2. What was done?
- just fix errors

3. Problems encountered?
- couldn't do many thins because of errors

4. What did you learn this week?
- nothing because of errors
- I spent lots of time to fix errors
- It's group work so very hard to fix it if someone change something.

5. What's planned for next week?
- I think, dance-tool has no errors, so I can add some code and all of animation from share drive.
- fix boundary box
- separate maya animation and max animation

6. Hours worked.
40 hours

Amanda's Weekly Report (for three weeks)

What was planned? Global game jam, work on Thesis, Sandbox papers.

What happened? Global game jam, which ate my life, worked on Thesis some more, which did not quite eat my life, started the Sandbox off of the Thesis, which ate my existance.

Problems? No study participants.

Next week? Finish sandbox, run people through the Elemental study, cruch current Elemental numbers.

New stuff learned? Not from this but from something else, I think I might have figured out a new way to do collision detection using the GP/GPU stuff.

Hours? 36

Katie's Weekly Report 2/16/09

Katie's Weekly Report 2/16/2009

1. What was planned?
-Complete a game design document and several prototypes for Bunny Generals D&C
-Complete the Sandbox Paper
-Re-pitch the study in the classroom in order to get as many participants as soon
as possible

2. What was done?
-Learned how to use RPG Maker
-Rough draft of paper is complete
-Study has been repitched
-Paper concept for Creativity and Cognition was formed


3. Problems encountered?
-Still no participants for the study

4. What did you learn this week? (esp. computer science, or anything surprising or
interesting) Be sure to cite any resources you used (e.g. online tutorials, etc).
-RPG Maker XP (http://rmrk.net/index.php?topic=762.0, http://rmxp.tigerseye.uk.com/)

5. What's planned for next week?
-Finish Bunny General prototypes by Wednesday
-Get IRB approval for Creativity and Cognition paper study
-Finish Sandbox deadline (yay for submission extensions)
-Get study participants somehow...possibly kidnapping
-First session with Citizen Schools, pre-test needed

6. Hours worked.
18ish

Antoine Campbell Weekly Report 2-16-09

1. What was planned?
*Work on a Bunny General XNA prototype, by reusing the RPG Tile Engine
*Read research papers from Mike.

2. What was done?
*Began work reusing the XNA Tile Engine
*Read a research paper from Mike, will post response on blog

3. Problems encountered?
*Others people code, nuff said

4. What did you learn this week?
*Mainly about XNA Tile Engine, would have helped a lot if I used it last semester instead of making our own. I'm learning about using XML loading.
5. What's planned for next week?
*Just continue working on a Bunny Generals Prototype.

6. Hours worked.
*About 11

Mike's Weekly Blog

1. What was planned?
Look over old study data and draft a paper for Sandbox 2009.

2. What was done?
I reorganized the old study data and tried to look for some patterns. I think the only way to write a significant paper from this data is to re-do all of the pre and post-test analysis as well. We need to give more than the qualitative differences between the games. A table with the learning gain effect sizes and the qualitative output might be interesting. The results do not need to be statistically significant if we publish all of the effect sizes.

3. Problems encountered?
It is hard to come up with the hypothesis for the paper. It is more of a report on stuff that we have done. It feels like the contribution is a little weak. We need to sell it higher, I've read too many papers that just end with "we think feedback is what makes games work."

4. What did you learn this week? (esp. computer science, or anything surprising or interesting)
I've been going over the XML datashop system. They did a good job of explaining how to use it and what the parts are, but the normal challenges of using other people's code apply.

5. What's planned for next week?
Start work on a "best practices for game studies" paper. Could analize the previous studies data again, I know some new techniques that could help find significant results.

6. Hours worked.
20

Acey's Weekly Report 2/9 - 2/15

1. What was planned?
Finish the puzzles!

2. What was done?
Only 4 puzzles left to go!


3. Problems encountered?
None it went very well.


4. What did you learn this week? (esp. computer science, or anything surprising or interesting)
As I work on the puzzles I am realizing that with my original design it would be possible to get frustrated and give up. Although the puzzles do scale it would be possible to get stuck on one and never want to play again. Therefore I am going to implement a Medal system. If you can complete the puzzle within 10 extra moves of perfect you will get a Bronze. Within 5 will earn a Silver and within 3 a Gold. In addition instead of requiring the player to complete the previous puzzle to unlock the next, they will come in packs: Easy, Medium, Hard. If the player scores Bronze or better on all the Easys they will unlock Medium. Do Silver or better on all the Easy and Medium and the Hard Puzzles will become available. This should give players incentive to keep retrying and getting better and better scores.

I have also began looking at Computer Science concepts in this game. The largest one is the concept of Optimization and Complexity. Players will have to think of ways to make every move count and thus optimize the solution. Since the game will already be keeping track of the moves the player makes it can then give those actions back to the player to illustrate time and space complexity of their solution.

The other big CSC concept that will be drilled home in the game (as compared to the original tool) is iteration. These concepts are in the original tool but can be avoided if the user does not want to use the Triangle and Linear Iteration Tools. In the game the player will be forced to use them to get high scores and thus will be exposed to this key concept.

5. What's planned for next week?
Finish the last 4 puzzles and begin looking at code. Also this week I will be able to get the first feedback on the puzzles by taking some of them to an outreach event. This will help me adjust difficulty as needed.


6. Hours worked.
20

Katie's Weekly Report 2/11/09

1. What was planned?

• Create a pitch, design document, and prototype for Bunny Generals: D&C
• Create an outline for the Sandbox Paper
• Solicit participants for the eleMental Study
  

2. What was done?

• A pitch was created, design document and prototype have been started
• Outline has been created for paper, actual writing is underway
• Contact was made with teachers for the study
  

3. Problems encountered?

• I've never written a formal, long-research paper before and didn't know where to begin. I had to keep pestering people for outline structures and tips.
• I've also not had much experience in creating design documents and prototypes so I'm still figuring all that out as I go
• Still no participants for the eleMental study and we desperately need more results than we have
  

4. What did you learn this week? (esp. computer science, or anything surprising or interesting)
Be sure to cite any resources you used (e.g. online tutorials, etc).

• I've learned a lot more about research papers. I read the Sandbox 2008 papers to get a feel for what sort of research they were interested in and what format to use for the paper.
• I've decided that a board-game prototype will not be an effective method for conveying game play mechanics so I will likely create the prototype challenges in RPG Maker and run some preliminary studies on those.
  

5. What's planned for next week?

• Complete a design document and several prototypes for Bunny Generals: D&C
• Complete the Sandbox Paper
• Re-pitch the study in the classroom in order to get as many participants as soon as possible
  

6. Hours worked.
20

Response to Game2Learn: Improving the motivation of CS1 students

1.What are the motivations for this work?
*Show the affect the Game2Learn program can have in helping CS1 students motivation to combat the attrition rates in computing. Help CS1 grasp a better understanding of programming concepts by playing games that teach.

2.What is the proposed solution?
*The use of games as assignments will provide students with the necessary visualization of programming concepts and motivate students to do well.

3.What is the evaluation of the proposed solution?
*The study showed the games made students enthusiastic about using games as homework assignments for CS courses.

a-What benefits or problems are identified?
*Though students enjoyed playing the games with the potential of having games as assignments students questioned the seriousness of the games as learning tools, and the games did not significantly improve the participants test scores in the initial study.

c-What are the contributions?
*The next study has a base of information to improve the seriousness of the games so they are seen as learning tools which people can accept as assignments. This study revealed that the games needed some in and out of game motivations for participants to do well.

4.What are future directions for this research?
*The results of the evaluations emphasize the importance of appropriate feedback, particularly how seriously the users considered the learning objectives of the game, and in motivating students to stay engaged enough to learn.

a-What ideas did you come up with while reading the paper?
*The game I work on I will be sure to keep the issues raised in this paper to create a serious learning tool that motivates the participant to do well and provides players with clear objectives and balanced challenging gameplay.

Antoine Campbell's Weekly Report 2-9-09

1. What was planned?
*Work on pitch document for Bunny Generals: Divide and Conquer with Katie
*Continue reading research papers

2. What was done?
*Completed a pitch document for Bunny Generals
*Read more research papers

3. Problems encountered?
*Nothing really, I only have 3 days I can be in the lab and
was only able to come in 2 days

4. What did you learn this week?
*How to compose a good pitch document, from a sample of a game design document
of Playing with Fire on Gamasutra

5. What's planned for next week?
*Look into methods for building a prototype, XNA tile engine, Ziggyware samples, custom engine
etc...

6. Hours worked.
*About 10

Acey's Weekly Report 2/2-2/9

1. What was planned?
Finish the remaining puzzles.

2. What was done?
Got access to the SVN and code base for the improved BeadLoom tool.
Continued work on the puzzles

3. Problems encountered?
I had to go back and recheck alot of my previous puzzles when I discovered one of them actually had a quicker solution. It is also hard to make interesting puzzles that still fall into the lower difficulty levels. If the first puzzles are too boring no one will make it to the challenging and artistic ones.

4. What did you learn this week?
It is sadly easier to brute force the initial puzzles and then find the quickest solution. I found that if I try to find the quickest solutions first I can often miss a faster solution.

5. What's planned for next week?
Finish the puzzles. If time allows start annalyzing the code I got this week.

6. Hours worked.
14 hours

Antoine Campbell's Weekly Report 2-2-09

1. What was planned?
*Read more research papers and post responses on the blog
*Begin work on a pitch document for Katie's game
*Find a meeting time where all the involved people can meet

2. What was done?
*Kept same meeting time Mondays 12:30pm - 1:00pm
*Posted a response for another research paper
*Game Jam fun!!!! unfortunately we didn't finish our game, or sleep

3. Problems encountered?
*Katie and myself are going to have a little trouble finding time to meet outside
of our normal lab times.
*I probably should have taken more than one day off work so I wasn't so overworked for
Game Jam

4. What did you learn this week?
*With a little focus our team was able to achieve a lot in 48 hours
*Rebuilding a tile engine should not be part of the Jam
*Getting students for a study is not easy(maybe trick them into thinking its mandatory)

5. What's planned for next week?
*Create a pitch document for Katie's game
*Post the responses for the papers I read this week.

6. Hours worked.
*11 for Game2Learn and about 24 for Game Jam

Su Hyung's Weekly Report. 02/03/09

1. What was planned?
being more familiar with the dancing project code

2. What was done?
I studied dancing tool code. and changed some of code

3. Problems encountered?
Global game jam

4. What did you learn this week? (esp. computer science, or anything surprising or interesting)
I learned unity java script in the Global game jam


5. What's planned for next week?
add many other animation from share drive to Dancing project
fix bug which notebook part can not move naturally.
fix bounding box for notebook

6. Hours worked.
20

Katie's Weekly Report 2/2/09

1. What was planned?

• Arrange a new meeting time
• Begin formalizing plans for Divide and Conquer
• Game Jam
• Announce the eleMental study and begin running participants
  

2. What was done?

• The current meeting time for our group remains at 12:30 - 1:30 on Mondays and will be used whenever necessary.
• Plans are coming together for Divide and Conquer but have yet to be put into an official pitch or Design Document
• Acey and I created Bunny Adventure? and missed out on lots and lots of sleep along with everyone else
• The study has been announced and appointment slots are available on Genbook.
  

3. Problems encountered?

• There is never enough time. With Game Jam beginning on Thursday, there wasn't a lot of time between our last meeting and this meeting where I was actually productive.
• Scheduling is difficult for meetings just because of the number of people who have to be coordinated to get anything done.
• Uploading to the GGJ site was one of the most stressful and frustrating experiences of my life.
  

4. What did you learn this week? (esp. computer science, or anything surprising or interesting) Be sure to cite any resources you used (e.g. online tutorials, etc).

• MS Paint is an excruciatingly tedious tool for creating 200 game images
  

5. What's planned for next week?

• By the next meeting Antoine and I will have an official pitch and design document for Bunny Generals, from this design document will will create individual milestones.
• Continue running the eleMental study
• Work with Amanda on a Sandbox paper for eleMental
  

6. Hours worked.

• 10ish, unless we count game jam...in which case it's a zillion.
  

Response to Wu's Castle: Teaching Arrays and Loops in a Game

1. What are motivations for this work?

*Show the reader that games can have a positive impact on teaching CS1 students arrays and loops by allowing them to visualize the execution of their code in a safe environment. Another way to combat attrition rates in computing by helping CS1 students gain a better grasp of programming concepts.

2. What is the proposed solution?

*Teachers using learning games such as Wu's Castle as homework assignments which show improvements in test scores amongst its players.

3.What is the evaluation of the proposed solution?

*The results of the pre and post test were recorded and compared among the three different groups.

a-What benefits or problems are identified?

*The benefits among the Game group show a consistent improvement on test scores of those that fully cooperated with the study. Some problems were with online delivery of the game some students had trouble installing the game, and since students played the game at home it was up to them to email the log files to the authors. Also the log files were difficult to parss through to collect the relevant data and future studys will use XML based log files.


b-What are the contributions?

*Most students enjoyed playing a game as homework for extra credit points. Students that participated typically improved their test scores and learned more about loops and arrays. The study exposed some problems with data collection which will improve the study for the future.

4.What are future directions for this research?

*Target CS2 students and show that games can be used to teach more difficult programming concepts as well as the intro concepts, but also the use of games to teach helps keep students in the computing majors.

a-What ideas did you come up with while reading the paper?

*I would think it would be preferred to allow students in large groups to play the game together in the lab to gain a lot of results quickly and be able to collect the log files personally. With the success of Wu's Castle these games should begin to make an appearance as homework in CS1 courses at UNC-Charlotte.