[game_edu] Group project team formation

[John Healy]

Hi Malcolm,

I would recommend taking a look at www.catme.org from Purdue. It allows for
building teams based on a series of questions and will allow you to put
students together after it has built the teams. It allows custom questions
and I've found it to work quite well for game development. Most of all it's
rigorous in terms of the underlying research behind it so I think it's a
pretty reliable bet.

As a benefit the peer review system built into Catme is excellent and can
show up conflicts within a team that might otherwise go unnoticed. Equally,
students get anonymised feedback in terms of how their peers rate their
performance and this can be really beneficial in game development education.

For team size I think you're spot on with 3-4 as I think anymore brings in
too much of a "free-rider" effect.

Best of luck with it!
John

On 13 July 2015 at 07:02, Malcolm Ryan <malcolmr at cse.unsw.edu.au> wrote:

> A question for other educators:
>
> I am running class which involved a semester-long group game development
> project. There are about 30 students and I want them to work in groups of 3
> or 4. I need a way to assign groups. There are a couple of constraints:
>
> 1) Each group needs to have a vision holder
> 2) Each group needs to have an appropriate set of skills to make their
> game.
> 3) Some students come wanting to work together and I would prefer not to
> break them up unless necessary.
> 4) Some students are quiet, shy or have language difficulties which mean
> it is difficult to get them to seek out groups of their own initiative.
>
> In the past I have let the students organise as they see fit. This has
> mostly worked, but there are always a small number of students at the end
> of the process who haven’t found a team. Putting these people together in a
> group has typically been a bad idea, especially if there is no-one with
> strong design or strong organisations skills in that group.
>
> Has anyone else faced this problem? Have you come up with any clever
> solutions?
>
> Malcolm
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