Back in July I wrote about a new writing assignment that I would be inserting into the undergraduate course that I’m now teaching. As is my standard practice, the directions for the assignment included a statement that students should refer to the rubric accompanying the assignment for an indication of how their work would be evaluated. I also instructed students to write about some of the concepts discussed by Tomer Perry in his series on best practices in game design (I put links to the relevant blog posts in the assignment directions).
Here is my mistake: the rubric did not have any criteria specific to the game design principles that students were supposed to address. When grading students’ essays, I didn’t think it was fair of me to penalize them for not writing about something that I had failed to include in the rubric. This was a reminder of a lesson I have learned repeatedly over the years but occasionally forget.