Random Lessons in Teaching

Just a bunch of lessons and teaching tips I picked up from observation and experimentation this semester:

1. Sometimes trying to arrange for a competitive advantage backfires on you. There was this one team which was hastily formed one week later than the rest due to scheduling and grouping problems, so I tried to pick the best members from other groups to compensate for the 1-week loss. The group ended up having three technical people, which was supposed to give them an edge in the second, computer game project. It didn’t really work too well, since they all wanted to do the same job, and it produced an imbalanced game at the end (high technical polish, low design values). Interdisciplinary variety is still best.
2. I need to improve my turnaround time on grading assignments. This semester was terrible in terms of keeping to deadlines for me. Admittedly, my workload tripled since I got assigned a second module to help teach, plus started my Master’s course. But not being able to get feedback and marks back to the students on time resulted in them not performing as well as they could have for the subsequent assignments. I have to improve my marking-turnaround time to three days or less.
3. Need to spend more time contacting students and using email to leave a paper trail. I was a bit slack in following up on students this semester if they missed classes. Partly it was because I was just too distracted and busy with other things, but still… it’s part of doing due diligence that I need to improve. Professionalism, and all that.

What to teach if there was an Advanced Game Design course:

• Player types, play styles and demographics (Bartle’s test)
• Emotions of play (Lazarro’s Four Keys)
• Difficulty curves – how to balance them across levels (Rule of 3? Mario’s 4 stages). Difference between hardcore and casual difficulty curves. Games should be forgiving of errors, but not easy to perfect.
• Choices – How to weight them properly. Not every choice should be equally important. How to manage cognitive load of player. Grokking. (Raph Koster’s Theory of Fun)
• Dynamics of play – types of interactions between different players, playing styles, how different player power configurations (asymmetric, zero-sum, etc.) lead to different dynamics.