From:                                                      Kelvin Sung

Sent:                                                        Monday, April 30, 2007 5:46 PM

To:                                                            Kelvin Sung; 'John Nordlinger'

Cc:                                                            'Ivan Lumala'

Subject:                                                  Award Number: 15871  - April 2007 Progress Report (XNA Based Games-Themed Programming Assignments)

 

Re:       Award Number: 15871: April 2007 Progress Report

(XNA Based Games-Themed Programming Assignments)

 

In April 2007, we have accomplished the followings:

 

  1. Finalized the design of an XNA assignment template (this is incremental work from March):
    1. Assignment Specification: included in this specification will be

                                               i.     Key concepts practiced

                                              ii.     Pre-requisite knowledge

                                             iii.     Suggested number of lecture-hours before using this assignment

    1. Grading Rubric
    2. Pre/Post Tests
    3. FAQ for faculty/students: this would include frequently asked questions and frequent mistakes
    4. XNA and regular C# implementations
    5. Step-by-step guide for faculty and student on the XNA implementation
    6. Assessment form for external faculty evaluator

 

  1. Completed the draft of 2 XNA assignment implementations:
    1. Assignments: Burst-A-Bubble and Monte-Carlo integration
    2. Currently, we are refining these two assignment packages.

 

  1. Completed a draft of XNA library for developing programming assignments. This library has the following characteristics:
    1. Device independent: users can specific any coordinate system to work in
    2. Graphics independent: users can draw circles, rectangles at will and need not be aware of the underlying graphics requirements.
    3. Viewport and status: users can printout status messages much like printing out status in a console.
    4. Dynamic Linking: the library is a DLL module. This means users do not need to work with the source code of the library.

 

  1. We would like to send the assignment packages to external faculty for first round of evaluation in late May/early June.

 

  1. Considering the “official starting date” of our project is in June 2007, we are quite happy with the progress we have made thus far. We are right on schedule for receiving feedback from external faculty at the beginning of the summer where the bulk of the work for the project will be completed.