It’s difficult to come to terms with the fact that I only have a couple weeks left of this term and class. I feel like this project has largely passed me by to be honest. The first few weeks were spent trying to learn the tools and dabble with creating some of the content we needed for our project, but it feels like our project is to build a house and all we’ve done is assemble some bricks. These next couple weeks we are definitely going to have to adjust our approach and really start putting things together. I hope that it’s similar to deep cleaning a room, where most of the time is spent digging things out of nooks and crannies and organizing, so the room is actually at its messiest about 80% into the project, and then that last 20% is where the real noticeable stuff happens. I guess all in all my biggest success from this course so far is that I’ve learned the basics of an entirely new system, and it all had to be self-taught. While the actual defined project still has a lot to go, I think I could put together a basic game relatively quickly and that’s something that I wouldn’t have had any idea of where to start at the beginning of all this.
As far as a SWOT analysis of the course, here is how I feel thus far:
-Strengths: Allowing the students to work on something more tangible than the vast majority of the assignments we’ve done in other classes.
-Weaknesses: My group and I have had very little direction and feedback from any sort of authority figure. I think even in the industry people will have some sort of managerial person that they report to that can give more direct advice and feedback. I guess we haven’t sought out anything directly, so I suppose this is a live and learn situation where maybe we should have asked for more help.
-Opportunities: It’s hard to know what the course can do differently when there are so many other projects students are working on that I don’t know the context of or what it’s like working on those other projects instead. I do think having some sort of “mentor” rather than just a TA to report to that is able to be more hands on in assisting with the project could be beneficial.
-Threats: The lack of accountability we have as students for our progress. Of course, we are accountable to the rest of our group, and for ourselves as well, but when all of the group are moving at the same pace, it’s hard to know if that pace is acceptable or not without someone telling us that we’re falling behind.
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