Group 1 – Jason Choy, Ray Chen, Vincent Cornelio
Professor Jill Belli
ENG 3773
12/16/2014
Progress Report #6

This last week was fairly straightforward, but intense nonetheless. After our out-of-class meeting we were left with a clear idea of what to do. Our primary objective was to finish the final project write-up and the final presentation, since we had already finished making the game. We began finalizing these last two parts of the project the day after our out-of-class meeting.

We decided to work on the write-up first, since we had a clear idea of what to do thanks to the peer review comments and the feedback received during the out-of-class meeting. We first discussed the changes we had to make, both in person and online, to make sure we were all on the same page. Thankfully we were all on the same page since the comments were very clear. With the report being shared online, the first change we made was putting the title of the game on the cover page. After this, the group began working on the appendix and improving it according to the comments. This was a very simple, straightforward task, but a somewhat time consuming one since our appendix is vast.

Unfortunately none of us were able to figure out how to exclude page numbers on the first two pages. At this point, we question whether or not it’s possible. Thankfully this is a minor issue, but it’s one we will just have to accept. We continued to edit the formatting over the weekend; after fixing the appendix Jason moved the Works Cited page so that it now appears before the appendix. He also added an endnotes page, took the unnecessary (but still somewhat useful) information out of the body, and instead cited this information in the Endnotes page while numbering the appropriate text in the body. We used standard MLA formatting for this, like we did everything else.

After we fixed these straightforward issues, we moved onto the report itself, rewriting it based on the feedback we received. We all discussed the feedback before preceeding, coming up with the plan to improve the writing so that it no longer appears compartmentalized, in addition to merging the research discussion with the game design discussion, and making the progression of the paper more logical. After coming up with the plan, Jason executed it, rewriting the majority of the paper, deleting unnecessary information, and even relocating certain parts of the text elsewhere. This process took about two days, but all of us are satisfied by the result. The paper flows much better now, and contains more relevant information.

Creating the final PowerPoint presentation didn’t take too long, since we just had to condense the information from our write-up into the presentation, and build off of our last presentation. We discussed what we had to do during an online synchronous meeting, coming up with ideas like adding a Works Cited page, focusing more on the thesis from the write-up, and incorporating more sources. We actually built off of our previous PowerPoint, but the final one is almost entirely different now. Jason rewrote it, Ray supplied some more pictures from different sources which are now incorporated into the PowerPoint, and Jason also added screenshots of the game itself to the PowerPoint. After finalizing the presentation, we discussed how we’d present it, deciding that we should all cover the topics we did the most research on. Ray will discuss his research on architectural design, how games affect learning, and how puzzles can be beneficial/intellectually stimulating, and how these things are incorporated into our game. Vincent will discuss his research on other game manuals, how this research affected our manual, and he will discuss our manual as well. Jason will talk about the game itself, how it’s intellectual (backed up by some of the research we did), and he will go over some of the survey results.

We are very confident in our project, and we look forward to presenting it to the class.