[game_edu] Firing Team Mates

[Ian Schreiber]

I've dealt with student teams during a two-quarter capstone, also. Were I to go back in time, I'd make sure the prerequisite for the second course was "instructor permission" (in addition to taking the first course) so that everyone had to pass some kind of review to complete it. I could easily delegate that responsibility to the teams themselves, and only sign off for people taking the course that had their team's OK. That seems like a very easy approach since there's a natural barrier to entry anyway.


If a student gets fired from a team and can't convince another team to take them on, I can only offer secondhand reports of this happening, but I've heard the options for the student who was fired would be:
1. Find another team to take them on;
2. Drop the course and retake later;
3. Do a solo project, and live or die as a one-person team where they have complete responsibility and control over everything.

Generally the slackers would take Option 2, and the people who are productive but just don't play nice with others would have Option 3 as a fallback.

- Ian



________________________________
 From: STEPHEN JACOBS <itprofjacobs at gmail.com>
To: game_edu at igda.org 
Sent: Friday, May 4, 2012 10:19 AM
Subject: Re: [game_edu] Firing Team Mates
 
I like Corvus' approach.  I've always set myself up as "executive producer" of all teams in a game and met with the student producer/project manager on a weekly basis who provides me with an update on what milestones everyone is (or isn't) hitting.  If someone's slacking then, depending on what their role is in the team, they could be reassigned or fired.  If they're fired, depending on the situation and the time in the academic quarter,  I might reassign them or just fail them for that part of the course.

Note that I our intro game design and development classes are two quarter courses where the teams change anyway between first and second quarter as we run multiple sections of game design and development most quarters. Sometimes we've run them as just the natural team changes from quarter to quarter.  Sometimes we've just walked in the third week of the second quarter and reassigned teams except the lead designer and/or producer to different projects, pointing out that when they get out in the industry they won't own the projects they work on, they'll be hired in and/or shuffled as the needs for given projects evolve.  
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