More final thoughts on my heavily-revised course on development from last semester: as explained in Parts 4 through 6 below, I included a scaffolded series of assignments on design thinking through SCAMPER, a method for creative problem-solving. In a debriefing discussion on the last day of class, one student expressed frustration that the game she and her team had built was not graded. I only graded how well students had written their evaluations of other teams’ games.
I thought this was a fair point, and said so. But my past use of peer review of student-designed games had proven to be useless — teams simply gave other teams’ games full marks regardless of the games’ actual quality. And I really did not want to get involved in the minutiae of assessing the quality of all the games that students had created.
Then I thought of applying the last phase of design thinking — experimentation and iteration — to the problem at hand, and this plan came to mind:
- Compress teaching about design thinking and the related preparatory assignments into a shorter period of time (e.g., first half of the semester).
- Teams of student design games.
- Each team plays and evaluates a game created by another team.
- I provide the evaluations of each game to its creators.
- Each team then uses the evaluations as feedback to improve the design of its game.
- There is a second, final round of game play. This time each team scores the other team’s game against a rubric. The rubric focuses on how well the second version of the game incorporated the feedback on the initial design.
This sequence might satisfy students’ expectation that everything they do must be graded.
Links to the original series on redesigning this course: