Since I last wrote, I have been assigned to the Capstone project to create a web version of a climate change game. I am working with two amazing teammates and a wonderful project sponsor who is the OSU professor for Introduction to Climate Change, in which over 1,200 students take each year. Our task is adapt a game that our project sponsor created for the course and turn it into a web-based game that students (and eventually anyone!) can play to help them engage with the course content and learn in a fun way.
How the journey is going far
This has been such a fun course and experience so far. I was so excited to be assigned this project since I am interested in educational game design and this topic also intersects with my passion for addressing environmental issues. Our project mentor is very inspiring and engaging to work with. We meet with her regularly to ensure our direction and progress aligns with her vision. My two teammates are also great and easy to work with, which makes this journey even more enjoyable and rewarding. Our team spent a lot of time pre-planning, which is the most planning I have done for a course project so far and found it to be a valuable experience to help with our development and ensure the process and software design goes smoothly. Now that we are underway with the coding and development part, it’s really cool and exciting to see our vision come to life and I’m looking forward to our final product!
Communication tools our team is using and how well that’s going
Our team primarily communicates over Discord which has been a great tool for us. According to our Team Standards, we know that we are available weekdays from 9-5pm and have check-ins scheduled weekly to talk about our progress and next steps. Discord allows us to chat synchronously when needed, and also respond asynchronously at times depending on each of our schedules. This week I also recorded a video demo of the code I was working on which was another effective communication method. We may use more video demos moving forward so we can quickly understand and visualize each other’s progress.
Do I feel our project is on-track to succeed?
Yes! Our primary goal overall is to get a working website that students in the Climate Change course can start using as soon as possible. We are on track to demo a basic, initial version to our project sponsor by the end of this week which is very exciting. To have a working website at this stage is something I am pleased with and encourages me that we are on a path to success. We still have more progress to make until it is final and ready for students to use, however I feel confident we will get there and end up with a project we are proud of!
While there are even more aspects of the game we would love to implement, such as an app version, we had to scale our ideas down to realistically fit the scope of this course and timeframe, however we hope to leave our project in a solid state that potentially future Capstone groups can build upon further.
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