Evie's Weekly Report 3-31-09

What was planned?

Finish fixing enough bugs in the dance tool to run a study.  IRB draft.  Write a DanceTool paper. Go to the GDC.

What was done?

ForEach and ForEachTill Loops no longer crash the system.  IRB draft started.  Presented at the Graduate Research Fair.  Presented the tool to middle school students.  Wrote a schema for the XML save files.  These files will be used to save dances as well as evaluate users.

Problems encountered?

ForEach and ForEachTill break conditions are broken.  Dance Elements do not know when to stop applying more dance instructions besides the end of the dance.  Also, nesting these types of danceElements was tricky, but I think that part of the problem has been resolved.  Email issues: Josh didnt get the XML email I sent so I'm a little worried about the implementation being what we need.  I'll send that email again after I finish this blog entry.

I had a lot of trouble working on the IRB draft because of this being such a high stress, deadline oriented week.  I've done 3 presentations (one remotely, while at the GDC) and 3 projects within GDC week and half a week before I left.

Fatal Error bug took up a large amount of development time last Thursday.  A windows error caused the app to hangup up and crash whenever we ran it.  Unfortunately, the compiler gave us no indication of where the problem area was... 

Max wont dance.  I think I know why so I'll see about resolving that this evening.

Windows problems.  The delete option of dance notes not implemented yet.  Critical.

What did you learn this week?

A lot of people know about game2Learn.  A lot of people from the GDC were familiar with our research.  Neat...

What's planned for next week?

IRB draft by mid week.  Continue cleaning up the tool.  Make scenario to do study on.  Experiment Design.  Timeline.  Write paper.

Creativity stuff

I hate that I had to rewrite this part, considering I think I wrote it much better an hour ago.

When I first learned to play the piano, I played by "ear".  During that time, my technical ability grew slowly.  Much slower than time spent in formalized learning environments, however, my creative ability, to hear things that sound "good" or my ability to discern relative pitches grew tremendously.  My early years learning to play proved invaluable.

While formalized learning has its own was of interpreting creative learning, I think the practice of doing mundane tasks for the sake of learning every possible permutation is a very creative process in which the user is learning something that is not easily taught and allowing the user to grow their skills into something that is specific to the user.  This type of data, I fear, is being waved away as attempts to "game the system" or guessing.  I'd like to look this metric and at more ways of interpreting this type of behaviour as creative growth.

I'll go into formalized learning and measuring creativity next week.

Evie's Weekly Report 3-31-09

Mike 3-25

What was planned?
Work on the effect size paper.

What was done?
Created a presentation for the Grad Research Fair. This included added quite a bit to the original submission. I had to do a little research to make the background etc better.

I did more research on the effect size paper as well. There are a few examples of other people suggesting similar changes across different fields. These are good examples of how to write this type of paper.

Problems encountered?
I have received cold reception to Level Up at SIGCSE and the Grad Research Fair. I'm starting to feel like it the combination of game research and educational research is in two areas that have low research standards and that makes Level Up unappealing. People currently doing 'game research' don't like it because it threatens their research practices, and people not interested in games or education are not going to become more interested because of it.

What did you learn this week?
More random stuff about different study problems etcs. Have a better understanding of the research practices in the feild.

What's planned for next week?
Work more on the effect size paper. Try to write it as if it is for game2learn students in the future. Finish it and see how it is recepted; if it is good then do a more detailed version about 'advanced' techniques.

Creativity Stuff
My thoughts of games and creativity...
Normal computer science classes, that is, non-graphical terminal based programming assignments etc, feel limiting to creativity. While problem solving is a creative skill, it doesn't 'feel' like creativity.

While doing my undergraduate degree I often felt the need to get out and away from CS. That is why I got a undergraduate degree in International Studies too. This is because normal CS does not seem creative. Most assignments do not require creative solutions, and there is only so much that can be done with a blank terminal screen.

With games you have a graphical solution, that is automatically better than a terminal program. Designing the game-mechanic requires thinking about the user and needs creative solutions to be fun.

Games also give you something that CS normally doesn't have, the ability to show some of your work off. You can show a game to people reguardless of their major and people will be impressed, or at least interested. This type of feedback prompts harder work and more passion with your work.

I recall having Art Major friends always showing off their work and getting feedback. No one ever ever ever wanted to see my linked list or my auto balancing trees.

The final way games induce creative solutions, when you are programming a game you have a very defined goal for your program. It isn't directly for a grade. You want to make your code run faster because it Must run faster. This motivates programming in a differnt way than offered in a typical CS class.

ijo desu

Yoo Shin's Weekly Report 03/25/2009

Yoo Shin's Weekly Report 03/25/2009

1. What was planned?

*to solve Dancenote problem and make Dancenote delete button

2. What was done?

* I installed Unity Windows version at Window machine. At that time, I encountered cross-platform problem. So I solved some of this problem with Josh by changing a DanceGUI and TimeLineGUI

3. Problems encountered?

*Cross-platform problem between Mac and Window

4. What's planned for next week?

*To solve Cross-platform problem and if it is finished, I would like to solve Dancenote problem and make Dancenote delete button

5. Hours worked

*16 hours

Katie's Weekly Report 3/25/2009

1. What was planned?
-Fifth session with Citizen Schools, student game development will begin this week
-Bunny Generals Prototyping
-Tapia 2009 (aka Samantha & Katie's Oregon Trail Adventure) in 1 week!

2. What was done?
-Fifth Citizen Schools Session
-Bunny Generals work continuing in XNA
-Starting proposals for Celebration


3. Problems encountered?
-Getting laptops for Citizen Schools is getting increasingly difficult
-My workstation is still dead
-Short notice on Celebration proposals
-Still no solid plans for Creativity and Cognition

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).
-Nothing particularly exciting this week

5. What's planned for next week?
-Sixth session with Citizen Schools, student game development will continue
-Absolutely need to have a study design or proposal for Creativity and Cognition
-Tapia 2009 (aka Samantha & Katie's Oregon Trail Adventure) in 1 week, need to finalize paper and plan our session with STARS
-Have a playable Bunny Generals prototype in 2 weeks
-Get my Creativity reflection finished

6. Hours worked.
15ish

Antoine Campbell Weekly Report 3-23-09

1. What was planned?
*Add a hud/console to bunny generals
*familarize myself with more Joomla! and php stuff

2. What was done?
*Try to use Joomla! using xampp instead of wamp
*Managed to break and then fix bunny generals prototype by adding a weird console,
the console was definately meant for an fps or something, it understood commands,
not what I wanted.

3. Problems encountered?
*Probably need to build a hud/console from scratch, or use Amanda's
*xampp is not a problem
*Wamp made like 10 services on my home machine stop, and break

4. What did you learn this week?
*Being a professional IT admin guy would not be cool, I'd rather program.
*some php, server stuff, how to break stuff using phpMyAdmin
*I'm an excellent debugger, especially fixing other people's errors

5. What's planned for next week?
*Show prototype to Dr. Barnes, hopefully get a lot of feedback on what I should add, I know
there is tons.
*Add some another type of sort puzzle to Bunny Generals(and maybe even a bunny),
work with Katie to make it more..........creative.

6. Hours worked.
About 12.

Josh's Weekly Report 3/16-3/22

What was planned? finish the project class. finish xml exporter

What was done? The project class now holds all of the danceElementList. I had to make changes to DanceGUI, Project, SuperArray, and TimeLineGUI to accomplish this, so that they reference the danceElementList in the Project object created when the game starts up. Changing songs through the drop down menu now changes the songInfo variable in the current Project object. TimelineGUI.js is fixed now. Windows was crashing because of being able to drag the timeline to a particular place in the song. You can't do that anymore, but Unity doesn't crash in windows now. This broke the animation blending in windows (but somehow not on Mac...stupid windows)

Problems encountered? unity 2.5 has problems with windows. It was crashing on startup, and now the animations are not blending. Neither of these things occured on Mac.

What did you learn this week? That cross-platform programming is often annoying. More C#-script was also learned

What's planned for next week? trying to fix unity problems with windows. Finish up being able to save and load dances. Possibly find some (legal) music for the dance tool.

Hours worked? 15 hours

Su Hyung's Weekly Report 03/24/2009

Su Hyung's Weekly Report 03/24/2009

1. What was planned?
- making all of animations for Max
- make function for max's move
- Icons for each parts, for example, head, arms,and legs


2. What was done?
- Made all of animations for Max by using Maya 2008
- attached Icons for head, arms, and legs on the left side.
- Unity code for separated Max's move 35%
- Made layered face image.
-> Basic face has only face outline and nose.
-> The file can provide changing position of eyes,eyebrows, and mouse, and change the each particular eyes,eyebrows and mouse.



3. Problems encountered?
- Nothing special.


4. What did I learn this week?
- Unity code for GUI, I tried to make tabbed pane, but I couldn't do that. Unity does not provided the function. So, I searched other functions. and I divided the windows for dancer node.

5. What's planned for next week?
- finishing max's movement, maya's movement separately.
- fix the warning problem. there are some warnings when I run the dancing tool.
- install svn client server on Arana server for backup.



6. Hours worked
- 20 hours

Acey's Weekly Report 3/18 - 3/24

1. What was planned?
Find a way to store puzzles.

2. What was done?
I found a way to store the puzzles that does not involve 41x41 points of data. Hurray! It only requires at most 2 x number of moves to complete the puzzle. This will make coding and storing the puzzles much easier.

Fixed a few bugs with the array representation of the puzzle.

Allow the second graph to display the puzzles based on the stored puzzles data.

3. Problems encountered?
No real problems other than realizing I was outputting my array in the wrong order. I thought I was storing it wrong; nope just system.outed in the wrong order.

4. What did you learn this week?
If your tester is wrong it is really hard to find the problem. I spent more time than needed looking for a bug that did not "really" exist because my toString method was reversed.

5. What's planned for next week?
Get at least one puzzle in (likely more but need one to do next part).

Be able to check current progress against goal image.

Provide feedback to user about which points are wrong.

Save High Scores. (May be pushed to next week)

6. Hours worked
20

Creativity:
Creativity is basically doing something completely new or making a tweak to an existing idea that has not been done in that way before. Creativity in games is becoming harder and harder as more and more is done. This is one of the most interesting aspects of creativity: what is and is not creative is constantly evolving. What would have been extremely creative even 3 years ago is now boring and mundane. This is a result of another interesting property of creativity: it varies based on ones personal experience. I'll explain with a story.

As a child I was in Odyssey of the Mind. This program sought to foster creative thinking in students by having them find a "solution" to a given challenge. There were different categories students could enter but I always entered in the acting one. Basically given a prompt we had to come up with a creative and humorous play. In addition to the play all costumes, stage, and props had to be made by the students, take up a small amount of space, and be made under a certain price value. This forced the students to think creatively to meet all these requirements. Over the many years I did OM me and my group slowly picked up "creative" tricks. However we started using these tricks year after year. Beyond the first year of their use were the tricks creative? To us using them no we had used them all (well a lot of them) the year before. But to the judges who had not seen last years competition it was all fresh and new and extremely creative. I also remember watching one performance by another group and just being blown away by their script. It was extremely creative and funny. After it was over I talked to my Mom (who also watched it) about how great I thought it was and it turns out it was almost punch line to punch line from a TV show I had never seen. This is really the heart of the phenomenon of creativity. It completely depends on past stimulus.

This extends to games as well. If someone had been in a coma for the past 40 years woke up and made Super Mario Brothers without any outside input that would be amazingly creative... to him. Everyone else would have seen it and been unimpressed (with the game not the fact he coded super Mario brothers after a coma). No matter how creative a person is they MUST have a breadth of knowledge about whatever they are working on. Otherwise an amazing idea they come up with might have already been done before. It also helps as a spring board to creative ideas. Changing a winning formula in a way that has not been done before can be creative if it varies enough. Majora's Mask was BASICALLY Ocarina of Time with the time system expanded. Even the most popular titles must change something and do so in a new way or eventually they will die off. This is of course a challenge to keep those core elements that the fans know and love while still making creative and positive changes.

The only exception to this needing to change to be creative I can think of in recent history would be Mega Man 9. Although it added nothing "new" in the main game the very fact it was so uncreative made it creative. Who would even think of developing a new NES game for the Wii. And the inclusion of the NES graphical glitches, now that was creative. Of course if they do it again with 10 then it WONT be creative any more. I would even go so far as to say if they tried the same thing with the X series and SNES graphics it would not be creative at this point. That is not to say I will not buy it and love it, it just will not be creative. I guess that is the entire point of this long rant. Things can only be creative AT MOST once maybe twice if you wait long enough. More often than not things will be creative ZERO times especially if you did not realize it had already been done before or if your change was not different enough from the preexisting baseline.

Josh's Weekly Report 3/2-3/8

This is for the week before spring break. I was out of town over spring break and did not get any work done...

What was planned? Creating and implementing the Project class and the XML structure for storing Dance's. Also, setting up a more efficient sort method in the SuperArray class

What was done? Fixed the sorting algorithm. It is now Insertion Sort instead of bubble sort. I chose insertion sort because it is particularly efficient with data that is already partially sorted (seemed like a good choice to me since people will probably choreograph the dance in order). Also, this fixes the problem of the last move added being played when an overlap occurs. Now the first move of that type will be played. Project, SongInfo, and XMLWriter classes added to the project. They don't do much yet. Made the fileGUI "Save" button create a project and save it to a text file. right now it just saves some sample text. Also, added Song enum to the GlobalEnums to represent songs in SongInfo class (works like controlInfo).

Problems encountered? Javascript does not support writing to files. I had to start using c# script for that

What did you learn this week? Some C# script! Found a tutorial on www.csharp-station.com

What's planned for next week? Spring break! After that, finishing up the project class

Hours worked? 20 hours.

Evie's Weekly report

What was planned? Project class. Finish wrap up fundamental programming functionality.

What was done? All blending functional. Moved code base. Etc.

Problems encountered? Sometimes blend commands "bleed" to the wrong layers causing unintended results.

What did you learn this week? Not much... I've just been coding.

What's planned for next week? Playtesting and paper

Hours Worked - 23 hours

Katie's Weekly Report 3/18/2009

1. What was planned?
-Go to SIGCSE
-Finish Sandbox paper (yay for submission extensions)
-Finish EleMental Study
-Third and Fourth Sessions with Citizen Schools
-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.

2. What was done?
-SIGCSE
-Continued research for the Creativity and Cognition paper
-Third and Fourth Citizen School's Sessions
-Prototyping of Bunny Generals in XNA
-Finished Sandbox Paper


3. Problems encountered?
-Driving to Chattanooga was one of the craziest trips of my life (RIP big bird thing)
-Scheduling for the Third Citizen School's session with 3/5 members at SIGCSE
-My lab workstation died :(
-Fourth Citizen School's session did not result in lots of student artwork, we may have to alter the schedule slightly in order to allow students enough time to make art.

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 love SIGCSE (and conferences in general) more than anything in the whole wide world
-Not all birds fly well
-There are some phenomenal options for outreach that are less scheduling-intensive. I really want to explore these options for STARS Alliance.

5. What's planned for next week?
-Fifth session with Citizen Schools, student game development will begin this week
-Continue research for the Creativity and Cognition paper, will be researching how creativity can be defined and measured
-Absolutely need to have a study design for Creativity and Cognition by next meeting!
-Tapia 2009 (aka Samantha & Katie's Oregon Trail Adventure) in 2 weeks!

6. Hours worked.
Counting SIGCSE....a lot. Probably...50ish for two weeks

March 18th - Amanda's Weekly

What was planned? Finish Thesis, parse the data, work on updating Thesis presentation slides, start the Grad Fair slides, and run studies

What was done? Ran studies, worked on updating Thesis presentation slides, started the Grad Fair slides and finished thesis up til the almost final edit

Problems encountered? Excel hates me.

What did you learn this week? See above comment. Oh, and apparently I am that idiot who cant figure out how you are supposed to wear the hood for graduation...

What's planned for next week? Thesis review with the Grad school (Thursday), final edits on thesis, clean up Sandbox paper and add in new data, finish Thesis presentation slides, finalize thesis and Grad Fair powerpoints, give Grad Fair presentation (2PM on Saturday, if you are interested), and then hop a plane to San Francisco for the GDC!

Hours Worked - something insane like 70 hours over two weeks

Yoo Shin's Weekly Report 03/18/2009

1. What was planned?

 

*to install Unity and Maya at Mac book for work because my Unity’s code was expired

*to solve problem which is Dancenote difficulty moving upwards in dance notebook

*to make Dancenote delete button

 

2. What was done?

 

*reinstall Unity and Maya at March 5

*I would like to solve Dancenote and making Dancenote delete button but I finish it.

 

3. Problems encountered?

 

*Installing Maya in Mac book was done at March 5 late afternoon by UNC Charlotte and last week was Spring Break so I did not have plenty working time.

 

4. What's planned for next week?

 

*to solve Dancenote problem and make Dancenote delete button

 

5. Hours worked.

 

*About 10

Mike 3-17

What was planned?
Go to SIGCSE, continue work on the effect size paper. Make a poster and paper presentation for SIGCSE on the Wu's Castle Paper and on Learning Curves in game data.

What was done?
Went to SIGCSE and presented a poster and a paper. Continued to think about the best direction for the paper.

Problems encountered?
There is a lot of information and unless it is shown right, the paper wouldn't be well accepted. Now is the right time for this kind of paper to be produced; I'm working on a narrowed scope paper dealing with mostly effect sizes.

What did you learn this week?
This was really more of a week of presenting and conference travel. Did not learn much.

What's planned for next week?
Work on the next draft of the effect size paper.

Su Hyung's Weekly Report 03/17/2009

Su Hyung's Weekly Report 03/17/2009

1. What was planned?
- Animations for Max
- Delete dancenote function.


2. What was done?
- All of max's head and arm animations


3. Problems encountered?
- Nothing special.
- Spring Break
- I tried to apply only animation from maya to max, I couldn't do that

4. What did I learn this week?
-

5. What's planned for next week?
- I'll make all of animations for max by Thursday
- make function for max's move
- icons for each parts, for example, head, arms,and legs


6. Hours worked
- 20 hours

Acey Boyce March 17

1. What was planned?
Create a second graph that the user can not change and add in counters.

2. What was done?
I was able to create a second graph that the user can not change but shows the coordinates of where the mouse is when they hover over it.
The game now keeps track of how many moves the user does including undo and redo. The user can also reset the counter by starting a new game.
Added a game menu to the original software. This menu is used to log in to the game and change from free play mode to game mode.
Added a game mode with all of unwanted functionality and windows removed. It also changes the layout of the screen for more optimal playing conditions (2 graphs side by side for easy comparison). This mode can be exited to return to the original free play mode.
Added interfaces for all future needed functionality including log in, puzzle selection, and high scores.
Added a few missing code segments to the Output Code window. This needs to be worked on and finalized later on though.

Also during Spring Break me and Katie went to Citizen Schools and did more Bead Loom and Bead Loom Game testing. Even though they have only had a few minutes each week they are already showing big improvements. One student even solved the Example8 using a series of rectangles rather than simple brute force. They also seemed to generally be having a good time playing the game even if it was only a paper/old system prototype. Best of all when I showed them how to reach the solution in only 6 moves they were really amazed. At least half the students then went on ad used that solution to recreate the goal. Each week the puzzles are getting more challenging and I feel by the end they will be really good at these types of puzzles and problem solving. It feels good to know this game should actually show powerful gains AND the kids seem to enjoy it.

3. Problems encountered?
The only real problem was discovering that the very nice idea of an output code window was not fully or even accurately done. I do not feel that the current code output accurately represents what is going on. Once the game is up and running I will need to go back and fix this.

4. What did you learn this week?
I have not worked with the Java GUI components in a long time so it was a good refresher course on doing things like text boxes, drop down menus, and other basic user interface stuff.

5. What's planned for next week?
I need to find a good way to store the puzzles themselves in the game. I feel it should be possible to store them as a set of moves, convert that to the array and use that for testing if their solution is correct. If this can not be done I will have to hard code in the solutions. That is 41 x41 points of data per puzzle (except where null but most puzzles have few empty spots). I REALLY hope it does not come to that but if it does I will seek the help of my fellow GameCATS.

If my theory of move storing works I should have a few puzzles ready along with a selection system. If not I will get the selection system ready and begin the task of code monkeying.

6. Hours worked
19

Antoine Campbell Weekly Report, 3-9-09 and 3-16-09

1. What was planned?
*Mainly finish Bunny General Prototype
*Add a HUD or console to keep the player informed of objectives
*Set up Joomla! on my home machine to test it out

2. What was done?
*SPRING BREAK!!!
*finished the prototype minus the HUD/console
*I've got Joomla! installed and starting to play with it/the deployment on the server may be a little different I assume

3. Problems encountered?
*I need a way to easily script player actions for bunny generals to show players what to do, and an event system. Not necessarily for the prototype but it would be nice.
*Testing Joomla! on my machine may not work the same on a server I imagine, maybe I'll try to use some virtual server software to do the testing

4. What did you learn this week?
*Setting up Joomla! (joomla.org)
*Re-Using XNA tile engine Event system(creators.xna.com)

5. What's planned for next week?
*Complete a HUD or console and begin playtesting of Bunny Generals Prototype
*Get Joomla! running properly on a Virtual Server

6. Hours worked.
*In the two weeks about 26

7. How has Creativity been a part of my CS projects, what helps to increase/decrease
Creativity?
*Basically the entire process of creating the Bunny Generals Prototype has been a creative process. Getting the game working with the minimum requirements as to not waste too much time with a game that does not help students. I think just having some constraints increases creativity, total freedom of design would be too open to focus on anything.

Mike

What was planned?
Writing a paper for Sandbox, looking up information about the Creativity in IT conference.

What was done?
I wrote some stuff for the sandbox paper, did a few literature reviews.
Read a massive amount of information about creating and evaluating scales for psychometrics. Also read about some interesting ways of applying MRC to this type of data. It is all complected, but.. it could be a good angle to get some well cited papers.

Problems encountered?
Massive amount of information to hold on to. I also had trouble focusing on the sandbox paper and often got lost looking up information. This is better for the paper overall, but not for the short term as we didn't get the sandbox paper out.

What did you learn this week?
100% of the game studies I read had some large flaws in their design. The ones with smaller design flaws tended to have large flaws in the claims they made after doing their paper. This is leading to many papers stating negative results about games when either the study design was bias, or the statistical results were not reported correctly.

For example, one paper failed to find statistically significant results and thus claimed that "games do not teach better than a paper assignment." We could run a large meta review on game papers... it might be good to simply call people on on it..

What's planned for next week?
SIGCSE!! maybe some more work on the Sandbox paper.

Amanda's Weekly Report (for two weeks)

What was planned? Work on Thesis, Sandbox papers, run study participants

What happened? Worked on Thesis, and ran study participants, crunched log and survey data, finished Sandbox paper, worked on figuring out improvements for the game.

Problems? None, now that I have study participants

Next week? Finish thesis up to the point where all I have to do is throw in the numbers to change the tables. Start planning the changes to Elemental.

New stuff learned? I can write papers?

Hours? 32

Creativity Musings - Sorry this is going to be disjointed...

In creative writing, I do best with a slight constraint - a small word count and a one word prompt to get the juices flowing is enough to send me off to the computer. By the same token, however, too large a word count leads to garbage when going off a single prompt. When working on my novel, however, I am only limited by what I can imagine and I am only confined by the setting and characters already established...so one could say that I am always constrained...it's a question of external or internal constraints.

When designing a game (not a G2L game), I go for what I think is fun and entertaining. Some of them have been complete and unabashed rip offs of other games, others have fallen well short of the fun marker, and some are more fun than they should be, considering. More to the point, however, designing a game is supposed to be fun, not work.

When designing a G2L game, half the time I feel stiffled by being crammed into such a small area with so many issues to think about that I cant get anything done at all. The other half, I am super creative. The problem with that is that the super creativity tends to sneak into code and we all know that creative code is no substitute for a good design.

As far as the classroom goes, you want creativity, you take the English courses...and not many of them are creative. The teachers get highhanded with constraints and the students, half of whom are taking it for an easy A, are lifeless, regurgitating the same trite styles that they think is the surest path to an A. The screenwriting course, on the other hand, we were given free rein on everything but the format...that was brilliant. It also emphasized 'show' not 'tell' which, as a game designer, is going to come in super handy someday.

Most of my CS projects outside of the games courses have not had creative content. Some of my games courses have had too much constraint on creativity...I can give you one, maybe two, major constraints but no more than that or you will get garbage for a game. Some of the games are sooooo constrained that there is no possible way for them to be fun, which totally defeats the purpose of making a game in the first place...

Eh, rant.ramble.off

Katie's Weekly Report 3/2/2009

1. What was planned?
-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.

2. What was done?
-Finally got study participants
-Read log files (ew.)
-Continued research for the Creativity and Cognition paper
-Formed more definite plans for a study
-Second Citizen Schools Session
-Concluded RPG Prototyping of Bunny Generals


3. Problems encountered?
-I'm always underestimating on how long things will take (like pretests)
-Students don't catch on to CSDTs as quickly as we expected
-Logging doesn't make clean, pretty files

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).
-Looking into Flow and Creativity by Mihaly Csikszent for the Creativity and Cognition paper
-I have a much better understanding of how to write an effective conference publication

5. What's planned for next week?
-Third session with Citizen Schools this week, work with CSDTs will continue
-Continue research for the Creativity and Cognition paper, look into proper Likert Scale design and game evaluation methods.
-Finish forming a study design for the Creativity and Cognition paper, form a solid hypothesis and determine what data is needed to support this hypothesis. Get IRB approval for the study
-Begin full development on Bunny Generals, have a playable full-prototype by the end of Spring Break, integrate in feedback from Dr. Barnes on the GDD

6. Hours worked.
20

Su Hyung's Weekly Report 03/02/2009

Su Hyung's Weekly Report 03/02/2009

1. What was planned?
- I wanted to change some animation lists because I cannot make finger animation, and feet animation. I didn’t make finger bones and feet bones. We (I and Evie) will discuss about that.
- Fix boundary with Yoo shin.
- Separate maya and max animation.


2. What was done?
- Set up new SVN server.
- Installed maya 2008 myself because I could not wait department’s install.
- Added jump, Run, Hurdle, leg shake, curl, and mowing animation.
- Fixed maya’s leg texture.
- Rearranged animation list
- From head, arm, hands, legs, and feet
- To head, arms, left arm, right arm, legs, left leg, and right leg


3. Problems encountered?
- Nothing special.
- We don’t have assets server.

4. What did I learn this week?
- Blending animation
- Unity 3d code
- Set up SVN

5. What's planned for next week?
- Animations for Max
- Delete dancenote function.


6. Hours worked
- 20 hours

Yoo Shin's Weekly Report 03/02/2009

1. What was planned?

*Solving problem related to dance dialogue box to go over boundary

2. What was done?

*Finishing dialogue box problem 

3. Problems encountered?

*I needed to solve more GUI problem in Dance Tool and most it was made by Windows version Unity’s so most Problem does not carry over to Mac platform. However Windows version Unity’s code was expired so I cannot check this problem on Windows machine. 

4. What's planned for next week?

*To solve GUI problem and Unity’s code 
(My windows machine’s Unity’s code already was expired)

5. Hours worked.

*About 18

Antoine Campbell Weekly Report 3-1-09

1. What was planned?
*Finish the first puzzle for Bunny Generals
*Work on the playground website

2. What was done?
*Finished the first puzzle for Bunny Generals
*No website updating will be done until he have a content management system, so I'm look into Joomla!

3. Problems encountered?
*Not really any problems with Bunny Generals it just takes time.
*Never worked with any sort of content management software for a website.

4. What did you learn this week?
*A little bit about Joomla! from some tutorials at joomla.org

5. What's planned for next week?
*Refine the Bunny Generals first puzzle to include lots of dialogue so the player will know exactly what to do without asking any questions, and add a console or hud where the player can review previous instructions and objectives.

6. Hours worked.
*About 14

Acey's Weekly Report 2/22 -3/1

1. What was planned?
Combine the Layers into one 41 by 41 array.
Outreach

2. What was done?
Managed to get the array created and it is always an accurate representation of the layers.

Also managed to run the outreach with MLK.
3. Problems encountered?
We had a little less time than we really wanted for the CSDT part of the outreach. This is because we thought the surveys would take about 3 minutes. They actually took about 15 minutes. Never underestimate how long it will take a younger audience to do paper work.

One other problem this week is that I discovered the new bead loom tool does not have a color iteration tool. This is because it operates in layers and each layer holds only one color. This will be a major thing to change because unlike the original tool which goes bead by bead the new one goes layer by layer. I will have to either change this or redesign some puzzles but I feel I need to get the basic game working first.

4. What did you learn this week?
Learned a lot about middle schooler students this week. As noted above in latter outreach we will definitely give more time for surveys so it does not eat into CSDT time.

Also learned a bit about how to first expose users to the bead loom game. They were asked to solve the triforce puzzle. Although most understood that it could be solved with 3 triangles all but one student could not figure out how to create a triangle. They were given a small amount of time (5 minutes because of the survey issue) to familiarize themselves with the tool. I do not think this was enough time and in the future I would like to give them more time before throwing them into the game. The other improvement I would make is starting with the tutorials. This would give a more guided introduction to the game and how to make basic shapes. I thought with some free play time students would learn these basics on their own but without some sort of guide only a few students took the time to experiment and learn the tools.

I also got some great feedback on my presentation to the lab. I will be able to use it to improve my existing presentation for the grad fair.

5. What's planned for next week?
I will not be getting a lot done this week because of 3 exams, homework, and a conference but I am going to begin working on creating a second graph that will display the puzzle but not allow the player to add or remove beads from it. Once this is done I will add in the move counters. I am sure this will roll over into spring break but I will definitely have it all done before Spring Break is over. If the 2nd graph proves easy enough I may even have one puzzle ready and implemented. Finally I will start looking for some side tasks for my fellow GameCATS to help me with. So far possible tasks include coding the puzzles in or solving the color iteration problem.

6. Hours worked.
17.5

Josh's Weekly Report from 2/23 - 3/1

What was planned? Getting the linked list and SuperArray classes implemented in the tool, allowing each body part to check itself for overlaps with dance moves of the same type.

What was done? Got the SuperArray class working with the linked list. Got all of my code to Evie and integrated into the project. Helped design the project class (for storing Dance's to be played, saved, and loaded) and wrote a document about it - which was added to the Tech Design Document. Got the drop down menu working (it actually allows you to choose songs).

Problems encountered? Not much to report this week. Still having trouble with the GUI on the windows platform.

What did you learn this week? As Evie said, Debug.Log is incredible. It allows you to write debug messages to the console.

What's planned for next week? Creating and implementing the Project class and the XML structure for storing Dance's. Also, setting up a more efficient sort method in the SuperArray class

Hours worked? 15 hours.

Thoughts On Creativity in Programming:
Measuring creativity is definitely a difficult endeavor.
I would definitely say that I feel most creative when I am in an environment that lends itself to creativity. The Global Game Jam is a good example of this; I was not present on campus, but I worked with my group remotely writing music and creating sound effects. It was alot of fun, and I felt very creative while doing my part (especially writing the music). I think was due to the open ended topic (i.e. not much restriction on what we had to do) and the severe time limit.
I also feel more creative when I am doing something creative, which may sound kind of circular. What I mean by that is that, if I am struggling with coding or designing a game or part of a game, I will play the imrovise some melodies on the piano, or sketch abstract pictures. When I return to the code, I am often inspired.
Coming up with a way to measure this feeling of creativity is tricky. Asking for a subjective measure of the person's feelings doesn't seem too effective (i.e. "on a scale from 1-10, how creative did you feel while...").
My first thought would be to ask a test participant who just played a game questions like, "how difficult was it for you to beat this level?", or "What thought process lead you to try your solution?" Similar questions could be asked of a game developer solving the problem of writing a particular method. Analyzing and categorizing the answers would be tedious and may not lead to siginificant results, but it's a thought.
That's all I've got. Hope it helps a little.