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.

Progress Report

In the last class we discuss how the requirement of the final write and first draft of the collaborative project. After class, we briefly assigned part of the project report for each one of us to complete and upload to google drive. Samson is going to upload the survey rationale on openlab for professor belli to comment on it. For our synchronous meeting, we are still going to held on Skype on December 7, 2014. Tony is writing the meeting agenda for this meeting, while Samson is doing meeting minute and Goutam is writing the progress report.

For the first draft of the final collaborative project Tony, Samson and I put together everything we did over the past two month. During our meeting on Skype, we have specifically talk about what each of us need to do to accomplish the report as a whole. For the discussion part of the report, Tony is going to discuss about mobile application design and layout, and application features; Samson is going to discuss about survey and term of use, he also made a simple term of use for our mobile app; finally Goutam is writing about the report conclusion and recommendation as well as introduction.

After we have done each individual parts of the report, we have upload everything on google doc. Then we are are going to do proof reading and discuss about the error that might occur. Finally, Tony will be responsible for uploading the first draft to dropbox.

Group 5: Chris, Deniel, Derrick, Lian

Professor Jill Belli

ENG 3773

Progress Report #5

On December 5, 2014 4:30pm to 6:30pm the group held a meeting at the computer lab in City Tech to discuss how to organize the first draft of the final write-up. We felt that we did not hand out enough surveys so a proper analysis would probably not be done, so we used the information we had currently for the time being. Since our project is to support City Tech’s computer club we wanted to collect enough data so it would seem more accurate to write a proper memo to the computer club giving recommendations on ways to improve. For the time being we’ve made an analysis based on the data we received from the surveys, more surveys will be distributed to obtain additional information later on to insure we get more accurate data. Also we realized that our memo that goes with the survey was a bit too long so we made some adjustments by taking only the key points and making them into bullet points. With the key points made clearer it would make taking the survey significantly faster while still being able to inform students on what the computer club really does and how can they benefit the students.

Progress Report #5 (12/3/2014-12/9/2014)

This week we met every day to work on the project and on 12/5/2014, we had a Skype call to discuss the content learned from the lecture by professor Belli. The main tasks during the week geared towards the completion of the first draft of the project. We began by fine tuning the selected questions to ensure that they would collect the necessary data, compilation of the introduction and the literary background, selection and documentation of data analysis methods, assembly of the results and discussion, formation of the presentation, formatting of the paper and a thorough revision of the final version of the first draft of the paper.

The first five meetings all focused on making sure that all the questions collected for the study had solid rationale for their inclusion on the questionnaire. They had to be both valid and reliable to enable the collection of accurate and informative data. After the survey questions were ready, the introduction became sublime and we were able to compile it within a single seating. The introduction matched the rationale guided by the questions that we selected from the ones that were available to us. Once the introduction was done, we went on to complete the methods and discussion sections, a feat achieved by dividing the work amongst team members. By the final meeting, the entire draft was complete with a table of contents, data analysis, an appendix and graphics.

The main obstacle faced during the week was the refinement of the questions selected for the survey and the lecture from Professor Belli went a long way in offering valuable clarification. Once that section was ready, the rest of the draft fell into place and the first draft of the project is ready to be present.

Group 1 – Jason Choy, Ray Chen, Vincent Cornelio
Professor Jill Belli
ENG 3773
12/05/2014
Progress Report #5

At this point, we’ve completed the game, the manual, and the survey. Over the course of the past week, Jason finished making the game, finalizing the fourth and final level and then playing it through to make sure everything works as intended. There were a few bugs that he had to fix, otherwise it was fine and both endings work as intended. He made two videos showcasing the last level: one for each ending, and both videos were shown to the group.

The manual has been complete for some time now, so we haven’t changed it but we will be distributing it very soon, along with the survey. We revised the survey as shown on our OpenLab blog post, although we followed up with another revision by adding two new questions and modifying another. This idea came up during our meeting, while discussing the body of the final write-up.

We will begin distributing the game, manual, and survey on December 6th. Vincent will distribute them to several family members, and Jason will do the same in addition to releasing it all privately online for certain people to test. Aside from this, most of our focus is on the final write-up, which we have all begun working on.

Everyone is making annotations for their sources that aren’t included in our annotated bibliography, so that we can have a finalized annotated bibliography which we will append in the final write-up. Each member also began writing about their sources; summarizing them and explaining in-detail how they helped us with our project. Once this is done (this won’t take longer than two days), we will come together and integrate it into the final write-up. Meanwhile, Jason has begun working on the cover page, table of contents, appendix, and works cited page. During our last online synchronous meeting (detailed in our meeting minutes from this week), we agreed on a layout for the final write-up which we are currently following. Our first draft will have more than what is required, and we should have the final draft finished several days early, if all goes to plan.

Progress Report
Derrick Richards, Lian William, Christopher Roberts, Deniel Boodoo
English 3773
Professor Belli
December 2, 2014

The semester is coming to a close so but we don’t have much work cut out for us. It was thanksgiving so we decided to not meet in person on Friday but we still convened on skype on Saturday. Since we’ve been working on so much throughout the semester and because we’re used to the format of our meetings, the meeting was smooth and to the point.

Our presentation was the starting point for our discussion and focused on a couple of key points. The main points we focused on were the feedback from the class, what we liked about others presentations and revising the structure of our own presentation. We then went on to discuss our survey and prime places to distribute it. Lastly, we discussed what we needed to move forward and end the semester strong.

Our main goals over the next couple of weeks are to get our deliverables in check and prepare our final presentation and papers. To do this we must convene with you to approve our work and then distribute and acquire our results from our surveys. Things become very systematic from there as we compile the data and use it to create our second memo and slides for the final presentation.