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Ability to effectively work in teams is one of the desired outcomes of engineering and engineering technology programs. Unfortunately, working in teams is still challenging for many students. Rather than contributing to team projects, some students resort to social loafing. Social loafing tends to destroy both teamwork performance and individual learning, especially in solving ill-structured problems, such as design. Furthermore, a bad experience on a past team is a significant concern as it could generate negative feelings toward future team projects. Formation of collaborative teams is a critical first step in team-project-based design courses as team composition directly affects not only teamwork processes and outcomes, but also teamwork skills and experience. This NSF-IUSE sponsored project aims to enhance students’ teamwork experiences and teamwork learning through 1) understanding how to form better student design teams and 2) identifying exercises that will effectively improve team member collaboration. We do this by comparing student characteristics and design task characteristics with the quality of the design team outcome, and examining the resulting correlations. Student characteristics cover six categories: 1) background information, 2) work structure preferences, 3) personality, 4) ability, 5) motivation, and 6) attitude. Task characteristics and design team outcomes are characterized using the Creative Product Semantic Scale. In this article, we present correlations between student/team characteristics and design project outcome, and correlations between task characteristics and design project outcome for 2020-2021 senior design teams at two institutions. For both institutions, we will present correlations between individual student characteristics and team outcome. For one institution, we will also present correlation between team-level characteristics and team outcomes.
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Scaffolding Game Design: Towards Tool Support for Planning Open-Ended Projects in an Introductory Game Design Class
One approach to teaching game design to students with a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds is through team game projects that span multiple weeks, up to an entire term. However, open-ended, creative projects introduce a gamut of challenges to novice programmers. Our goal is to assist game design students with the planning stage of their projects. This paper describes our data collection process through three course interventions and student interviews, and subsequent analysis in which we learned students had difficulty expressing their creative vision and connecting the game mechanics to the intended player experience. We present these results as a step towards the goal of scaffolding the planning process for student game projects, supporting more creative ideas, clearer communication among team members, and a stronger understanding of human-centered design in software development.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1917885
- PAR ID:
- 10338630
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Visual Languages and Human-centered Computing Conference (VL/HCC)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 5
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/VL/HCC51201.2021.9576209
