progress+report


 * Student task**: see the task page

This report written end of week 5, term 2 (June 4, 2006)

The student wikis were started in week 1, term 2. I had started the africa game wiki during the end of term 1 holidays and I showed the students this as an exemplar of the sort of thing I wanted them to do.

Students had been blogging solutions to game problems in Term 1. I decided to go with wiki for the task of designing, making and evaluating a game because the students had the option of working in teams and wikis can handle more diverse information.

Wikis are more complex than blogs, they have more features. It took at least 3 weeks for students to get the hang of various wiki features and for a while I was anxious that it might not work too well. Initially many students had difficulty with things like:
 * making new pages
 * inviting people to join their wiki
 * setting up navigation on the sidebar
 * uploading a picture or file to a page

After 3 weeks with not a great deal of progress I decided to award progress marks with clear guidelines about what needed to be done. For the first progress mark I asked for these things:
 * invite teacher to join your wiki
 * sidebar navigation
 * at least 5 pages and I suggested (optional) page names such as progress, pics, downloads, wiki tips, game maker tips, links, problems and solutions
 * three substantial bits of writing for the previous week
 * links to other class wikis
 * one game download per week
 * at least one screenshot per week

Eventually I persuaded all groups to invite me to join their wikis and once that had happened I created my own kerr page on their wikis and used that page to leave comments for them about things done well, things that still needed to be done and I leave their progress marks on the page too. This provides regular feedback and an incentive (prod) for students to keep their game documentation up to date.

Once these things were in place things became smoother and I could monitor progress week by week.

By using the Recent Changes (whole wiki overview) and history feature (page by page) of my students wikis that I can quickly track what they have done on a week by week basis, whether they are making regular changes or becoming slack etc.

First go to Recent Changes, visit updated pages from there, then use the history feature to do a comparison between the current version and the version I last looked. The history comparison shows additions in green and deletions in brown. So I have a precise record of what changes are made to the wiki week by week.

I mark the wikis each weekend and remind the students on Mondays to read my comments and to catch up on the things they have missed out on.

In the past I have found it difficult to keep their game documentation up to date and that the method described here does require some nagging on my part but does work far better than pen and paper journals, enabling the teacher to keep track more easily, to provide quick feedback and for the student to be able to do more diverse things (screenshots, downloads, copy and paste code snippets).

At the end of week 3, I was anxious that the wiki method would not work. But by the end of week 5 I now think it is working fairly well - but there are still some groups that do need to improve their documentation.

Visit the student wikis (sidebar navigation) for more detail on their progress. First click will take you to the initial teacher page on the student wiki, before they invited me to join. Follow the link at the top of this page to visit the student wiki, which contains a kerr page where I have left more recent comments.

Summary, wiki advantages:
 * students more likely to keep game documentation up to date (with some nagging required from teacher)
 * student games can be posted to wiki for easy download (far more convenient than other methods)
 * students are learning to work in teams, the wiki facilitates this, they each learn to document their contribution - patchy but it is working, some of the wikis are now starting to reflect real teamwork
 * wiki features (Recent Changes and history of each page) makes it easy for teacher to keep track of week by week progress //and to observe which students improve their work by editing//
 * as well as game making student are learning a useful modern Read / Write native web application