[game_edu] Evaluating individual students on semester long project classes

[WEARN Nia H]

Yeah, I think we've dealt with all of that -

On that first point, we're kinda moving to that model next academic year - having senior 3rd year students as leads and 2nd year's as junior / grunts / cannon fodder - the idea being they will graduate to be better leads. The 3rd years will have to apply for the lead roles, to hopefully make sure the correct people land the best roles for them, and the game. We will also bringing in a mechanism that if they don't pull their weight as juniors, they can't take the senior 3rd year module, which actually has a knock on effect for their entire degree classification. Hopefully, that's enough stick....

The upside to this is that team size will grow massively - currently we have 14  2nd year groups of about 15 students, I haven't quite done the calculations of how many will be in the junior / senior team combos yet.

It's tricky to deal with less motivated students it mid semester, sometimes less useful students see the light mid way though and pull their socks up, we've done much more with self reflection at an early stage to see if we can facilitate this.

We have experiences of teams growing and shrinking too - there's a different make up of students that are pulled in to the 1st and 2nd semesters of the group project - so concept Art students are only on the 1st semester, Games Audio are only on the 2nd, and then there's the natural wastages of people dropping out, or moving team, and I tend to leave that up to student, they only have a small window in which to move groups - it's usually not a issue for the individual that swaps, but it can come to a bit of a shock to the rest of the team if they've lent on them a lot.

We try and iron out each issue and a case by case basis, sometimes it's as much as pulling people aside and pointing out tension, or talking to the group as a whole - we try not to have too much written down, it lets us be more flexible and let's us take into account the individual..

- Nia

________________________________________
From: game_edu-bounces at igda.org [game_edu-bounces at igda.org] On Behalf Of Ian Schreiber [ai864 at yahoo.com]
Sent: 07 January 2012 20:00
To: IGDA Game Education Listserv
Subject: Re: [game_edu] Evaluating individual students on semester long project classes

Related issue that just occurred to me, for projects that span multiple academic terms (e.g. a year-long senior project). How do you handle course registrations? There are all kinds of issues here:

* Growing the team. In many professional projects, you start with a core team that hashes out the design and gets things to the prototype stage, then during the production phase more people are added to do the actual work.
  - Should student projects reflect this? Does anyone have, say, a capstone experience where a bunch of juniors are brought in during the last half of the year to do a bunch of the grunt work, and those students will then become the core team for their own senior project the following year?
  - Even if not, student projects do tend to grow in complexity during design. If one of the team has a friend who wants to contribute to the project (or who has already been contributing), do you have mechanisms for bringing those people into the class so they can get academic credit for their work, even if it's only for the last part?

* Shrinking the team. There's always that one team member who is a pile of dead weight. Terribly demoralizing to the rest of their team and tends to drag everyone down. In industry, these people would eventually be fired from the company, or perhaps moved to a different role.
  - Do students need to reach some kind of minimum bar to enroll in the continuation of the class? If they don't contribute what they need to in Fall, does your school even allow you to deny them entry in Spring? (This might involve the continuation having "prerequisite: B or above in previous course" or just "prerequisite: instructor permission" for example.) Do you do this based on grades? Based on your own choice as instructor? Do you give teams the power/responsibility of firing one of their own ("voting them off the island" as it were)?
  - In the case of students who were dragging down their team, what happens to them? Do they have to wait until the next year to try again, essentially having their graduation delayed by a full year due to one class? Are they allowed to continue, but they have to work on a new team or on their own individual project instead? Or do they stay on, and you just have to instruct the team to deal with it internally as best they can?

* Students who voluntarily leave. The equivalent of an employee who quits mid-project. This can happen for all kinds of reasons: a student might have family or financial issues which force a leave of absence from school, for example, or they might just be burned out and need some time to recover.
  - Do you have a mechanism built-in to the project-based course to deal with key team members leaving: ability to bring in replacements, or just cross-training so that no individual on the team is irreplacable? Do you have students do contingency planning for what to do if each individual fails to get their work done for whatever reason? Should you?
  - For classes where you have several student teams, what if a student wants to switch teams? Does it make a difference WHY they want to switch (just feeling more excited about one of the other projects, vs. personality conflicts with their team)? Do you make these decisions yourself, or do you allow the students on each project to make the call (and if so, by what mechanism: does it have to be unanimous on both teams to allow one student to move between them, or just a majority, etc.)?

I know what I've done in the past, but am curious if others have run into these issues... and if so, what you did about them at the time, and also if you've formalized the process a bit so that these kinds of things are handled up-front in the syllabus now...

- Ian

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