Group 1 – Jason Choy, Ray Chen, Vincent Cornelio
Professor Jill Belli
ENG 3773
11/18/2014
Progress Report #2

Our group remains ahead of schedule. Since we already had the first two levels of the game completed last week, our focus for the upcoming session was to gather more specific research, set an agenda and complete a meeting with minutes, and get started on the game manual. We have accomplished all of these tasks, in addition to finishing the majority of the third level of our game.

All three members looked for sources that talk about how video games can affect learning, or a related topic. Although all three members found sources on the topic, we decided to utilize two of them, which we’ll bring to our next class session. Ray also found more useful articles about 19th century (or older) European architectural design for prisons, dungeons, torture chambers, as well as the function of these places. Vincent will print one of his sources from last week, which is a game manual for “Penumbra”.

Jason continued working on the game, nearly finishing the third level. He recorded several videos showcasing the third level, and shared it with the rest of the group. He will bring a laptop with the game installed on it to the next class, so that the rest of the group can play it.

In order to prepare for the next class session, we began making the manual for our game. We ended up creating 19 pages so far, covering the system requirements, installation, introduction, configuration, advanced configuration, and controls of the game. We chose not to advance further without feedback from Professor Belli.

In our synchronous online meeting we decided that Vincent will bring a sample game manual to class. Ray will bring an article on related architectural design along with images of old dungeons, as well as an article on how gaming affects learning. Jason will bring our game manual in its current state, the game itself, and an article on how gaming can be intellectual.

Before our meeting on Friday, November 14, we had a short in-class discussion about what our group is going to accomplish to the next week. During the discussion we have decided to make Tony Chi as our project manager, Goutam writes agenda for next meeting, and Samson takes minute on what will be discuss at meeting. We all came to an agreement that agenda and Minute responsibilities will be shifted every week among each group members. Due to incompatibility of each group members schedule, our group decided to held synchronous meet online through Skype every week, not only that, we will be using WeChat (mobile application used for sending instant message) to share ideas during unofficial chatting.

So for this week group meeting, Goutam created the agenda and Samson had taken the minutes for our online Skype meeting on Friday. During our meeting we discussed on how the layout of our application should be, what feature needs to be appearing on the app and what make a mobile app attractive. We also shared some research links during that meeting, and some of them are very useful towards making a decent mobile app.

On Monday, Tony shared a simple prototype of the application. The application is very simple but clean. It has features like weather, direction, link to City Tech official website, contact info, and social media connection. We decided to leave it simple as it is because we want to move further after we get feedback from the survey. The Application is subject to change base on the survey that we are going to conduct at the end of next class. Goutam will be in charge of survey, but Tony and Samson will be assisting with the survey. We were able to complete our primary goal of creating the prototype.

For our next class, Goutam will bring the survey and other source materials; Tony will bring the simple prototype and other materials; Samson will bring his research materials. Lastly, before Tuesday midnight, our group leader, Tony will review and submit the documents to the blog and dropbox.

Ivan, Rene, Enrique, Iurii

Progress Report#2

Prof. Belli

11/18/2014

As we discussed it in class on 11/12/2014, this week, our group members have met to decide on the material and the design of the game. Moreover, we have brought our ideas and brainstormed on the rules of the game. Ivan and Rene, sketched and designed the layout of the game. Enrique gathered and prepared the heart of our game, which are electric parts. We will work on how to put it together at a later time. Iurii has been coordinating the writing of the progress reports and agenda. As we have agreed during the class session we have got several very important things done during the week of 11/12-11/19/2014:

• We got pretty close to knowing of how our game will look like in final results, as Rene and Ivan had made sketches and plans of the game;
• Design and materials are in the stage of preparation to the actual assembly and will be ready shortly. As Enrique finds all proper electrical parts and Rene prepares the outer materials;
• Set of rules is clearly stated, but need slight revision as we move along the process. They will also need to be laid out properly;
• Rules are part of our deliverables along with the manual. we are moving along nicely and are already working on the deliverables parts.
• As well, during the group discussion, we dealt with security concerns, which our classmates had. Security will be implemented through the design and construction of the board game. Moreover, we decided to include extra security instructions in the manual for teachers along with how they will put together the game if they wish to make more.

Basically, we are ALMOST ready to start physically building our game, and are looking forward to meeting again and bringing all of the materials and parts together to make a whole object. We still need to do some further research and then testing but we are making good progress.

What we discussed in the brief meeting we had was how to proceed with our project and what the next step will be and what are some of the obstacles. For this week we are going to start composing the questions for the survey. We are going to compose the questions from the different sources that we collected and other surveys that are similar. From those sources and surveys we need to see which questions are relevant for our survey. After we complete the survey we need to get it reviewed by the professor and get it approved. If it were to be approved we might have to give our surveys to other schools.

One of the obstacles that we ran into was how to get students from other schools to fill out our survey. We need to be able to compare our results with other schools to see if our results match up with the school’s statistics.

Group 5: Chris, Deniel, Derrick, Lian
Progress Report:
During the past week our group had to gather information for the group project from multiple sources. To work in collaboration we had to first divide the work into simpler tasks to
get the job done starting with two annotated bibliographies per person. Chris researched other university’s computer clubs and compared them to City Tech’s current computer club to learn
how other computer clubs operate and to gain information on ways that can possibly benefit City Tech’s computer club. Deniel’s research was based off other CUNY colleges to learn more
about the hardware and software that are provided for the students, this is useful to determine if there are common problems between the CUNY colleges and the ways they address issues.
Derrick researched on the CUNY bylaws, this benefits our project because it teaches us what is acceptable to do as a student in CUNY and how can it either help work for the students or
against them. As for Lian he gathered information about City Tech’s own computer club by getting in contact, via email, with people associated with the club. This is beneficial to the
project because it allows us to learn more about the computer club’s current status in various ways. The group meetings took place at 4:30pm to 6:30pm at the college library on Fridays and
a skype session on Saturday around 2pm to 3pm, during this time as a group we brainstormed for ideas and shared suggestions on how to forward our project. Other than the meeting days, information was shared via email and text message to keep everyone up to date on the project’s current status.

For our project’s current progress, we are using google drive for our documents. With the use of Google drive, we are able to view other member’s progress, and documents. The convenience of the drive is, if there is anything we would like to edit, we can edit on the spot, and other members can see the changes too. While doing the bibliography, we’ve found useful information on how to build our application. We found a website which can help us build a mobile application, and another source that gives us idea on how to make it better. Usually our communication is through a group instant messaging, although the response from members are sometimes slow, due to work schedule. We contact each other and decide what to do prior to the deadline. Usually after class, we take a few moment to discuss our next assignment.

This week, we had plethora of synchronous and asynchronous communication that discussed about the direction of our project. To start off, after our meeting with Professor Belli, we were disgruntled about the situation with our final project. We didn’t know if we wanted to start from scratch with a new topic or continue with our existing one.

After emailing Professor Belli and getting her feedback, we decided to go with our existing project but take it in a different direction. We went through a total of 5 Skype conversations lasting 2 hours, 1 hour, 45 minutes, 30 minutes and 1 hour respectively. We also texted each other throughout the week to keep in touch when to have Skype conversations and the schedules of all the group members.

Once we figured out the direction that we wanted to take our project in, we delegated which items each person had to do research on. The items that were assigned to each person were: Rosa will do research on transfer rate, Ogulcan will do research on graduation rate and Calvin will do research on similar educational surveys and determine which questions are asked and could be relevant to the project.

Our progress for the collaborative final project is going by more quickly and more smoothly than expected. In our last class session, our topic got an unofficial green light so we have been continuing to improve upon our proposal which was also an assignment this week. We also completed our annotated bibliography for this week.

During last week’s class session, we all sat down and looked at the comments posted on our proposal (first draft). We took note of what was mentioned, and several days later we added the missing information to our newer draft. We did this by using an online chatroom and discussing the things we should add and improve in our proposal. Once we added more specific information to our proposal, Jason sent out a copy of the revised proposal to everyone, and we all proceeded to discuss it further before finally uploading it to Dropbox.

We also completed the annotated bibliography last week. First we decided on the topics each of us should research. Since Ray already found a useful source the previous week, we decided that he should use that and find another source on the same topic, which is architectural design that will influence our game. Jason volunteered to gather sources on the horror genre in the video game industry, since he is very familiar with that field. We all agreed that Vincent should look up game manuals for similar games, since we’d be making a game manual for our own game. Each of us gathered two sources, and wrote our annotations for them. We put them together and Jason reformatted it to fit MLA standards. After our annotated bibliography was put together as a single document, we read over it again and composed some minor revisions, before uploading it to Dropbox.
Throughout all of this, Jason has been working on the game itself. He actually started before we handed in our original proposal, since time is of the essence. He has finished making the first two levels of the game, and sometime this week (most likely Wednesday) he will let the other group members playtest the game.

So between our last class session and this week’s, we’ve had three meetings, which were done through online chatrooms (essentially synchronous communication). We plan to have a face to face meeting this week as well, so that everyone could see how the game is progressing (although Jason has uploaded videos of it). This sums up what we’ve done so far, and we’re now waiting for the next class session to see what we’ll do next.

Throughout the past weeks, our group has been working collaboratively to accomplish tasks we had to do. First of all we brought together all of our ideas and shared, evaluated and synthesized the most optimal role for each one of us. So that everyone in our group has an interest in the project, and can evenly contribute to the process of accomplishing it. Yet, most of the time we were working separately, each of us had made our portion of annotated bibliography research( 2 sources per person). As well we have clarified on what materials and technology we are going to use to make our game. Rene is responsible for cardboard work and designing of our game, he has skills in this area. Enrique so far works with the electrics and technology part of our project, since he is in the electrical engineering field. Iurii, mostly gathers research information and synthesizes information together making connections, as well as writes progress reports. Ivan leads writing of the proposal and has put every piece of work we write separately together, as well, he is the coordinator of the group. All this is happening while corresponding with all of the group members. The documents are constantly open to other group participants on GoogleDrive, so they are worked on synchronously. We communicate through text messaging and skype, since those are most convenient and each of us are  pretty busy. All of our work we accomplish and revise together in the google docs, where we are able to have a live editing and chat synchronously. So far, we were able to work together through the online meetings in a google document environment. Every weekend we come together for about three hours per week simultaneously editing work we have done.