On July 18th Mike and Kelvin met at Kelvin’s Office. The following are records from our discussion.

 

  1. Response to Ruth’s feedback on BurstABubble:

 

    1. The feedback is in general encouraging. An on-going theme is the “overwhelming factor” for both faculty and students. For faculty to develop the assignment and for students (especially early in CS1) for doing assignment. When all the modules are ready, we can re-evaluate this topic again from a “top-down” approach where we can look at all the assignments, all the XNA tutorials and attempt to derive a systematic guide for both students and faculty. This is good work we can do after the August break.

 

    1. Mike as taken the initiative of going over and addressing the fixable issues pointed out by Ruth. Mike has started a document describing this effort. As before, this will be posted in response to Ruth’s feedback.

 

  1. Response to Ruth’s feedback on Pong: Our XNA solution using of “Pong” for showing priority queue did not go well. Ruth pointed out several important shortcomings:
    1. Subtle, or not-obvious queue operation: when adding new circles to the list, it is not at all obvious new ones are appended at the end.
    2. Fun: in order to see the list/queue in action, the player is actually encouraged to miss.
    3. One queue with two insertion: strictly speaking this is not a good example showing queue ADT, two instances of queue would be a much better demonstration of working with Queue ADT.
    4. Test cases for XNA: we don’t have any for XNA but we have some for console based solution. We should address this in-balance.
    5. Response:

1. we will texture map different “objects” to the circles, e.g., low priority ones will be “lighter” objects: e.g., feathers, balloons,  clothes, etc. while “high priority” ones can be objects like, bowling balls, gold bars, etc.;

2. instead of bouncing around the dropping objects, the user will try to “catch” the objects, “normal priority” objects worth something, and “high priority” objects worth more.

3. The dropping objects will still “bounce” off the side walls, but will not bounce off the paddle, instead, the paddle will be replaced by a “net” to catch the dropping goodies.

4. The source code shown in the assignment guide is slightly different from that in the actual source, we will fix this.

 

  1. Releases this week: we should try to release Othello and Ladder/Rope this week.

 

  1. Othello: the work remaining are:
    1. XNA Pre-Assignment Lab manual [Kelvin]
    2. XNA Sample solution [Kelvin]

 

  1. Ladder/Rope: the work remaining are:
    1. Console version readme file [Mike] (is this done?)
    2. XNA:

1. Student description [Mike]

2. Starter project [Kelvin]

3. Pre-Assignment Lab Manual [Kelvin]

4. Grading Rubric [Mike]

5. XNA Sample Solution [Kelvin]

    1. Improvement to the prototype Ladder/Rope program:

1. Animate the piece moving on the board: at the time of writing this document, this is done. One problem is, the animation of the piece significantly increased the complexity of the solution. Depending on Mike’s opinion on this, we may have to take the functionality out.

2. Instead of scooping up gold with landed on the cell, scoop up all golds along the way: not done because of complexity of solution this may involve.

3. Movement: instead of always moving forward, allow moving forward and backward.

    1. Most of this work are XNA related, our approach is:

1. First pass sample solution for Ladder/Rope (done)

2. Refinement for Starter Project [Mike]

3. Refine starter project and derive final version of sample solution [Kelvin]

4. Pre-Assignment Lab manual [Kelvin]

5. Student description [Mike]

6. Grading Rubric [Mike]

 

  1. ART Work: our plan of engaging artist to design/develop custom art for the assignments may not be a good idea:
    1. Adaptation: how are other faculty going to reproduce the art we have?
    2. Contract details: we must figure out the details of contract agreements with the artists.

From both aspect, engaging outside talent to deliver custom materials is not desirable. Instead, we have looked on-line for public domain/free art works. We have discover some sites (proper reference is in release document), where as long as we don’t sell our assignment modules, we can use the art work. We have no plan of selling any of this work.