Marley Schafer

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How will I introduce Scalable Game Design in my school?
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Project Journal
Summer Institute, June 1-11, 2010

Reflection 1, June 1, 2010 On the first day, everyone began to familiarize themselves with the Agent Sheets program by creating Frogger games. Because this was most people's first time, even this simple game took a lot of work. We also began to realize how difficult it is to create video games, especially complex ones like Halo. We had four different teachers who walked us through the process and we also were able to pull up the tutorial page on the wiki and follow along. Although it was my first time actually creating my own, I was already acquainted with Agent Sheets because it was used at my school this year. Since I had some prior knowledge, I preferred to read the instructions on the wiki-page so I could go ahead of the group a little bit. Overall the first day was intensive but still fun and gave me an idea of what to expect for the rest of the week.

Reflection 2, June 2, 2010

Today's assignment was to create a Space Invaders game. This was definitely much more difficult that Frogger. We learned how to make the agents interact with each other automatically and move together. One of the new requirements was to "animate" the barriers by making them deteriorate each time they were hit by the laser or bomb. This probably took more time than anything for me because I had to draw and modify each version of the barrier after each hit. I was able to get it to work after several attempts and would like to do the same thing with the mother-ship at some point.

Reflection 3, June 3, 2010

I thought today was the most fun so far =). We spent some time learning about diffusion in relation to game design and then applied it by creating a simple Sim (in the form of Homer Simpson) who searches for and eats a tasty donut. Afterwards, we were encouraged to come up with our own variations of a simple Sim game. I decided to make mine a restaurant with a waiter and customer interacting. This turned out to be a lot more complicated than I thought. For quite awhile, I felt like I was working in circles and adding more and more variables every time! Eventually I worked out most of my problems with things like command sequence and identifying "needs" for my characters. Although I still have quite a bit of work to do, I feel like today went by way too fast and it was definitely the most enjoyable this week.

Reflection 4, June 4, 2010

Today we were given time to complete our Sims projects and begin on creating our own games. I spent the first five hours of the day working in circles on the Sims, and I accomplished very little. I then decided to take a break and create Sokoban. This didn't take me long at all and I found it to be quite enjoyable. One of the most useful things I learned when doing Sokoban was how to insert a step counter. Now that I know how to do that, I think I may go back and add a "score-keeping" function to my Space Invaders game!

Reflection 5, June 7, 2010

Today we created a virus simulator which shows how viruses are passed in places like a daycare. I didn't have much trouble with most of it until I went in to change something and suddenly none of my people would move. This took me quite awhile to fix, but eventually I figured out how to make everything work. They transmitted the diseases when they touched each other and then if they didn't pass by the "doctor" icon they would most likely die. When everyone dies, the game is over and the epidemic "takes over the world". If the disease runs out and no more people are affected, the game is over and everyone is safe. Though this was pretty basic, one small mistake at the beginning caused me to be set back quite a bit.

Reflection 6, June 8, 2010 We spent almost the entire day working on creating a Pacman game. While teachers presented how they would teach this in a normal classroom, we acted as their students and followed along. There was also a complete and very helpful tutorial on this which I pulled up for reference in case I missed something. Today went more smoothly than any of the other days. I am beginning to feel as if I am finally getting a hang on this whole AgentSheets thing! That is definitely a good feeling and I am less frustrated today than I have been all week.

Reflection 7, June 9, 2010 This morning, we spent some time going through "stations" in which we visited Fred's Science Discovery classroom, learned about troubleshooting, and had an opportunity to work on our Pacman games. My group went to Ashok's debugging lesson first. Personally, I think this was one of the most helpful things we've done so far. We talked about problems that typically arise when creating Frogger and had the chance to simulate troubleshooting in a classroom situation. This time went by very quickly and I feel like it helped me a lot. After that, we had an hour to finish and submit our Pacman games. Finally, we were taken over to Fred's classroom to observe the 6th, 7th, and 8th graders who are participating in his summer program. Because we were the last group to go over there, we missed most of the actual teaching part. We were, however, lucky enough to get to see the kid's games completed or at least close. It was interesting to walk around and see their different versions of Frogger, Space Invaders, Tracking games. I was impressed by their creativity and their passion for creating these programs, they really seemed to enjoy it! Though I didn't have the chance to help any of them very much, it made me excited to work in a classroom setting and see what kinds of games other kids will make. In the afternoon, we watched a simulation of foraging ants. We then saw another version of it which was missing a crucial aspect: the homing command. All we had to do was implement hill climbing into the ants' behaviors and they resumed their harvesting. I thought it was very helpful that Clayton encouraged us to tinker with the numbers in the simulation and see how it affected the ants' behavior. By breaking it down and looking at each element individually, I gained a greater understanding of the various techniques used in this simulation.

Reflection 8, June 10, 2010 Today was spent mostly on lesson plans. Although at first I felt like this would be slightly irrelevant to me as a student, I found that I enjoyed providing my team-members with ideas from a student's perspective. Also, we were asked to get an idea of which teachers we will be helping in the Fall. Since I'll still be attending Hoehne High School, I'll help Kristen Schafer, Beth Kreutzer, and Kyle Coles as much as I can. I am also open to helping Ron at LaVeta and Tracy in Pueblo since neither of those are all that far from Trinidad.

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