WUP

CSCI 300 F07

Assignment 2

Title: Development of an Active Personal Learning Plan for the Gaming Material

Scope: Sufficient material to ensure 100% coverage of the requirements and achieve the objectives. (See Deliverables for further scope detail.)

Objectives: Formulate a personal plan for covering the material in the text and learn

what you need to know about game programming to do it effectively: so

1) Review of the resources available in your DarkBASIC Pro installation and on the McK-226 installation. Look for Discoveries!

2) Create a Personal Learning Plan to Guide your work for the rest of the semester. (Give a short presentation of your plan in class and show off your discoveries.)

Requirements:

1) Skim Chapters 8 through 23 with the objective of determining the scope of material to be covered. (i.e. assess the scope of the objective) and then

2) Review the folders of support and project material provided and make a list of the materials. Support materials come with the copy you acquire of DarkBASIC Pro.

3) Create a Personal Learning Plan which you will turn in. This plan will be used by you and your instructor to assess your progress. Try to balance a desire to be ambitious with a desire to be realistic. Minimum requirement is to cover all the material in the textbook and do a project designed to show what you have learned to your instructor and associates (classmates).

Guidance:

The DarkBASIC Pro comes with a large range of resources that together with the textbook gives you lots of ways to learn how to do many interesting and important things. But to learn these you have to explore. One way to do that is to engage in systematic search, skimming through the textbook, and skimming through the folders of your DarkBASIC system and the system as installed in McK-226 making an inventory or notes as you go. You should learn to execute a representative sample of the code you encounter. Get a sense of how large and complicated it is. What kind of resources does it require to run? In particular watch out for tutorials and working examples. These are the kinds of things that convey the most information in the shortest amount of time.

It's a good idea to 1) Create an Inventory first. What is there? Where is it? How might it be useful? — and then 2) Create a list of things that you need to learn to accomplish the objectives. Make it detailed and organize the details by categories. Take Sprites as an example. You need to learn about them in an organized way. So where is the information about Sprites? The textbook has some, and there are likely examples that use sprites among the sample materials. You would want to find and study them. Now you need to 3) Imagine an orderly path through the maze of material that you have found and list it as your plan of attack. You can only do one thing at a time so you need to figure out what order to do things in.

It is probably a fairly good bet that the order in the book is a good starting point since that was also a problem that our author faced. But you might very well want to make some digressions to study some things more deeply, or study some things that are not handled well in the book using outside resources. The book does not offer a lot of material on the development of the graphical resources needed to make a game. So you might very well want to explore that more deeply using books from the library, or internet resources, or resources that you purchase separately.

Once you have your sequence, then you want to map it to a time line. The obvious timeline is the weeks of the semester. Plan to spend something like six to nine hours outside of class each week working on your plan. That means that over the next 13 weeks you should expect to do between 80 to 120 hours of work at least.

You will need a Work Unit Plan, like this one for each week of the course. For this assignment you need to give me an outline of your WUPs. You also have the option to just use my WUPs, but that limits your flexibility. A satisfactory WUP Outline would have a title, a brief description of the objective of the work and the approach to be taken, and a brief description of the planned deliverable(s). Deliverables must be tangible physical things that are conveyed at the end of the work, such as working demonstration programs, or documents, or other items you have produced. A complete WUP should be turned in at least a week before the work described is due to be turned in.

Deliverables:

There are five deliverables for this WUP:

1) A written Personal Learning Plan in machine readable form

2) An Associated Material Inventory which lists the material you will learn covering at least the textbook material and related material from the examples.

3) An Outline of Work Unit Plans for the remainder of the course, one per week each having a) title, b) objective, c) approach, and d) description of deliverables.

4) A Project Concept (this can be preliminary and can change) The project is your show piece at the end of the course that represents what you accomplished.

5) A brief PowerPoint presentation describing your plan to be presented to the class. The objective should be to deliver your plan in summary form in about five minutes.

Provide all material in machine readable form in your class J: drive folder in a subfolder with the name WUP2.