Calvin, Ogulcan, Rosa

Progress Report #6

12/10/14 – 12/17/14

Immediately after the discussion we had with Professor Belli on 12/10/14, we needed to immediately start revising our write up and find a new deliverable. Considering the amount of time that we had, it was hardly any. We however were lucky because we knew the direction that we were going.

We immediately started to work up on our write up on our skype meeting on 12/12/14. Thankfully we were in the right direction because of our class colleagues and our professor. What we did was remove the unnecessary components that wasn’t needed and afterwards started to input our new ones. We also created a to do list that showed what stuff need to be done. We fixed up our cover pages and table of content and went on from there.

After the Skype meeting we had on 12/13/14, we were still revising our write up from the comments that we received from professor belli. What we did was reviewed our to do list and determined who will do what assignment that we came up with. This was a great idea because it kept us in sync and everything went smoothly. We also started to work on our introduction and we started to re construct the data analysis section and results based on our feedback. Finally before the meeting ended, we decided to introduce context for the official student teacher evaluation for City Tech faculty.

During our next synchronous online meeting, we progressed on our write up and fixed all issues from the first draft based on the feedback. We checked up on our to do list and looked at what was left to do. We also started to work on our memorandum. This was needed to be done asap considering we needed to show it to Professor Belli ASAP for revision. We also fixed our works cited section in the correct MLA format. Before our meeting ended, we worked on editing the appendices and added more details to th conclusion and results.

With our meeting with Professor Belli on 12/16/14, we had a clear sense of exactly what to do. First we needed to start revising our memorandum because it was clearly missing some key factors. We weren’t quite clear on how to do our data analysis and luckily professor Belli was generous enough to help us in the right direction. We had a skype meeting that same night and created a new memorandum and updated our data analysis and the results section. In addition, we also added extra details to our conclusion and finished our presentation for our last class.

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.

This is final week before the final report and presentation is due. Our plan was to have everything completed on Monday and submitted. Then we will work on the presentation on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, we’ve meet with the professor after class and received a lot of advice in regard to improving our final report, Such as sorting the table of content, and ways to clarify our contents. Before leaving, Professor Belli handed back our draft with comments made throughout the package. At night, our group member that had the draft scanned all of the pages and sent it to the rest of the members.

We all started working on our part of the final report, report back our progress, and continue to distribute our survey throughout City Tech with the help our friends’ network. On Friday, we communicated through a chat client (Skype) to keep up to date on what is missing from our work. We’ve clarified our work again and see if any other members need help with their part.

The survey, terms of use, and introduction revision was completed on Sunday night. Response data from the survey was collected from Google survey Sunday evening and used in our survey discussion. We’ve added more research materials within our final report. Such as materials we’ve had used before but left out.

On Monday night, we put everyone’s work together and all members proof read the report for errors before finalizing and submitting on to dropbox.