Debbie's Second Class Cycle: Last Day

November 13, 2009
First class of the day: I got to Debbie’s first class early. Laura, Elisa, Debbie & I were thoroughly prepared to upload the students’ games to the Scalable Game Design arcade. As usual there were some unanticipated difficulties, such as a couple of the students couldn’t log into their school network accounts. This made access to their games impossible, but we still managed to upload everyone else’s games without too many problems except for time constraints. Most of the time problems resulted from the students still having saving issues. The most common was the game folder, the aplet folder & the screen dump being saved to different files/areas of the computer. The most common was the game folder in Agentsheets file &/or the screen dump saved in the pictures file. The aplet folder as the newly generated folder was usually on the desktop or once in awhile in the documents area. The challenge was to get all three folders in the same place, & then zip the aplet & game folders. Lastly, all three folders were uploaded.

Each student had to log into SGDA with their individual user ID & password. Then the student needed to choose the appropriate class, Agentsheets version & click “Turn in Assignment.” Probably the most confusing piece was the final one where each piece (screen dump, aplet, & game folder) needed to be browsed for separately, one right after the other. Once all three pieces were in place the student needed to click on the “Submit” button at the very bottom of the page. No, this is not rocket science, but for beginners anything out of the ordinary can be confusing. The games were uploaded with no time to spare!

Second Class: Since all four of us (Elisa, Laura, Debbie & myself) had had so much practice with the first class, the second class was significantly smoother. Also, none of the students in the second period were unable to log into their network accounts. This difference meant that the game uploading process took less time, giving these students a bit of leeway to play each other’s games. A very productive day!