Tasks

• Submit proposal
• Discuss research documentation and demo with Lloyd
• Make GitHub repository and empty Unity project
• Finalise SRE topics to cover
• Work on finalising game design
• Create Trello board
• Identify core game mechanics for Demo submission
• Look at research report assessment criteria

Summary

This week I met with Lloyd for one final discussion about my proposal before the submission, we discussed some feedback he had already given me and offered some final small tweaks before the submission. I also propsed my game idea to him and we dicussed the logistics and potential additions to the idea.

After the meeting I looked more into existing curriculums and policies for SRE; each school makes their own policy based on the advice by the government and so each school’s curriculum is different. I finalised the topics I want to cover in my project.

I also setup the GitHub repository ready to start prototyping some mechanics.

Next I spent some more time working on the design document I currently have for my project, adding in some of the ideas from Lloyd and clarifying some features. I spent a good chunk of the week thinking about possible online features besides a leaderboard. I didn’t get too far with this and so will need to continue looking into it, but I did come up with the idea of challenges where real-time challenges would take place where the player can gain more points. This left me with some pretty clear features that I could begin implementing.

Also this week I broke down all the features I want to implement into tasks and created a Trello board to add them into. I then went through each feature and determined the most important ones to implement by the Demo submission, the core mechanics of my game. I also begun to plan out in which order to do these in over the six weeks until the demo submission.

I gave one last look over my proposal and submitted it.

With the git repository setup I also started some simple development, setting up some basic UI screens to get a feel for the flow of the game. Two of the UI screens are shown below:

The images show placeholder of buttons which will be updated down the line, the pupose of creating a simple UI setup now is to get a feeling for how the game will work and develop the design in iterations.

Finally this week I looked at some of the existing research reports on Blackboard from previous years and started to lay out my document. I also started to plan what I would like to talk about in the research document, which gave me a starting point for research to undertake from now until the research submission.

Next Steps

• More theoretical research into game based learning and gamification.
• Research into types of learning and their links to games.
• Creation of the office game environment in the Unity project.