Final Reflection

For my final reflection, I don’t want to look at just one quote, or one article we read this semester. What I want to do is look at the whole process of designing my project, and how I felt all the readings in one way or another helped me.

When I started working on the project I read a lot of articles dealing with constructing knowledge and game play (mostly the Dickey and Papert articles). This influenced my general design ideas. As I mentioned before this isn’t a traditional learning tool, but I wanted to incorporate the idea of the user being engaged (game theory) with them being put in a learning situation where they would construct their own knowledge about the subject matter. Those were two of my main principles I wanted to stick with through the design of the project.

After I had my foundation I turned my attention to how I wanted the project to look, and how the user was going to interact with it. While working on this section I read a lot of articles by Gal and Kapor. As I’m sure you noticed one of my favorite articles to comment on was Footholds for Design by Shahaf Gal. This article more then any other spoke to me about the process of working through a project, and the obstacles you find along the way. I could relate to the student in the article, Ray, because he had an idea of the bridge he wanted to build, but it kept on changing based on new information that came to light as he worked. To me it was the same way, I would get a “foothold” on what I wanted to do, and then I would look at what was ahead, and work from there. I kept on repeating the process until the project was completed.

The final topic I wanted to comment on was how helpful it was to get feedback from others about my project. It was good in two ways; first, after working for countless hours on the same project it’s nice to hear “good job, it looks good so far.” Up until the point you show it to someone else, you don’t know how someone is going to react to your ideas. You may think it’s great because you have put so much effort into it, but you need another set of eyes to validate your thoughts. Secondly, as I was working on the project I thought, I wonder if I should do this, or that, or maybe change this color, etc. Even though you are designing the program, you can still be indecisive about little things. That’s why its good to get another persons input, they can help you out when you don’t know if changes need to be made.

I must say I had fun working on this project, it was a great learning experience for me, and I hope I can use this as a base to further my skills.

References:
Dickey, M. D. (2005). Engaging by design: How engagement strategies in popular computer and video games can inform instructional design. Educational Technology Research & Development, 53(2), 67-83.

Papert, S., (1996). A word for learning. In Y. Kafai & M. Resnick (Eds.), Constructionism in practice: Designing, thinking, and learning in a digital world (pp. 9-24). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

Gal, S. (1996). Footholds for design. In Winograd, T. (Ed.), Bringing Design to Software (pp. 215-227). New York: Addison-Wesley.

Kapor, M. (1996). A software design manifesto. In Winograd, T. (Ed.), Bringing Design to Software (pp. 1-9). New York: Addison-Wesley.