Final Blog

The final exam is tomorrow, so this will be my final post. Just in case some of my blogs don't get full marks, I want to have this one here to help reach the full 20/20. I wanted to take this last blog to critique this course as a whole. Talk abut what was good and what was bad and how it could improve for the next game dev students taking it. This is just a follow up or more in depth look of the course to go along with the end of the year course evaluations.

Why not start with the good. In my honest opinion I thought most of the homework questions were fair. Not too difficult, just take time to research and fully implement. I liked this year that the questions didn't expire pass a date similar to passed years when if X amount of students did a question it became worthless. I do however think having a date in order to get more points would have been helpful. What I mean by this is similar to Lennart Nacke's GDP2. You could do as many questions as you wanted when you wanted but if you did more early you were rewarded with a "midterm" you wouldn't lose any grades for not taking the midterm but you would actually get a small bonus depending on how well you did.

The times of each class were good not too early not too late. I don't really like the split up time periods (1.5 hours twice instead of 3) but I know these were the universities decisions and not the FBIT faculties'.

Another good thing that was enjoyable with the class was the use of class participation. An example would be when we had to get into groups to draw scene graphs of our game on the board. It helped get through the class material much better.

Now to focus on some of the things that needed much improvement. Sadly, I think this whole blog work was flawed. I don't mind making a few blogs now and then to keep people updated on work, or to help keep me up to date with learning course material, but when it is mandatory and assigned as work, there should definitely be marks involved. It's not very fair to have work assigned to do but not receive any marks for it. Instead, we just get penalized for not doing them and the penalization is unrelated to the blogs. We lose marks on our GDW and most of our blogs are unrelated to the GDW anyway. If we had a separate blog one worth individual marks, and another worth GDW marks.

Another thing to change would be how the homework questions are graded.They are worth 20% of our final grade. I am totally fine with that. If I don't do half of them I deserve to only get the 10%. To lose an additional "up to 40%" on my final exam (which is worth 40% of my total grade) is kind of unfair. I don't think these should be directly related at all. It's a really negative way to try and force us to do more homework questions.

This course has been good and has also been an improvement over other Hogue courses in the passed. I truly think that these classes would be the best if they were structured like any other University level course. It should simply be structured like this:
20% homework questions
10% blogs
35% GDW
35% Exam

Maybe lower the final and add a midterm? I just feel like there shouldn't be extra penalties for not doing a certain part of the work.

Thanks for reading and please do not take any of this personally, it is just my opinion.