[game_edu] Group project team formation

[Jose Luis Soler]

​Hi Malcolm.
 Here in www.floridareplay.com, Spain, we work with teams of 15 people,
divided in sub-teams focused on skills and roles: art, technology, design
and business, based on students preferences and background. It makes us be
able to obtain games with significant scope, deepness and art level and
minimizes the problem of lazy or low-level students.
 We like big teams in order to practice with SCRUM, Kanban and inter-team
communication. Each sub-team has an specific producer and they are the
interface with teachers and other sub-teams.
 In addition, to work out the idea, we follow the next process:
 - Each students brings three simple ideas (breakthroughs). One or two
lines.
 - The whole class votes and they choose the best breakthroughs from each
student.
 - Then, they develop this idea to one sheet extension (few graphical
references, basic mechanic description...)
 - The whole class votes again and they choose best three ideas.
 - We form three groups and they develop even more this ideas, arriving to
a simple ten pager.
 - The whole class votes again and we choose the best idea.

 This process takes a full time week.

 Best regards.

 José Luis Soler
 Florida Universitaria
 imagineMAKEplay


2015-07-13 23:57 GMT+02:00 John Healy <johnhealy123 at gmail.com>:

> 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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>
>
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