Reflection paper / blog 48

This is a formal writing assignment, so pay attention to thesis, organization, grammar, sentence structure, and vocabulary. You should write about the same things you presented on (what you did, why, final product, difficulties, what you learned) but also assess your strengths and weaknesses: what did you do well and what could you have done better?

Lillian Xu

English II

Apr 25th, 2016

Reflection Paper

Pobby and Dingan is the book that our English class is reading recently. We were required to do a creative project that is relevant to the novel, so me and Kevin were thinking about making a game that is based on Pobby and Dingan. We decided to create a Monopoly at first, but after we wrote our proposal paper, we found it not so relative to the novel. In the second class period that we were working on it, me and Kevin thought of making another role playing game that is based on text and could get everyone involved. This project was challenging, indeed, but the difficulty stimulates our desire of making the game interesting and perfect.

The game is created based on the plot and characters of Pobby and Dingan. On each page of the PowerPoint there would be some text on the top explaining the situation and what had happened, and the would be two choices beneath that for the players to choose. Each choice will lead to two different pages, and it might also lead to different endings of the game. We were planning to make a PowerPoint with hyperlinks in pages to make the game functioning, but we need an outline before putting the text into it. Me and Kevin shared an google docs, so we could both edit it and correct each other's grammar mistakes and other problems. Besides the facts and the plot written in the book, we had also added our imagination into the game by adding our own thoughts and make up some facts in the story. Kevin had even add some mine craft videos into the scenes when the protagonist Ashmol was in the mine and on the funeral of Pobby and Dingan. We spent two class periods and the whole weekend on writing and revising our draft in a docs document, and then we started putting them into the PowerPoint.

After we finished our first draft in google docs, we started putting it into google slides. We separated our work on doing the PowerPoint: I copied and pasted each scene and questions into the PowerPoint and make the PowerPoint look better, and Kevin inserted the hyperlinks and made sure that everything works. After we had done inserting everything, we asked someone to play through the game. While she was playing, we found a lot of mistakes that we couldn't see in our rough draft. For example, Ashmol wanted to find dad, and he ran straight to the police office without being told that his dad was there. And there is another example, where Ashmol and mom went to the police station to take Kellyanne back, but left her in the police station. For fixing these problems, we first added a page between and inserted the hyperlinks into that page, but then we found everything messed up, because the links were leading to pages, and the pages were all different than what we set up after adding the additional pages. So in order to fix that, we dragged these additional pages to the very end of the PowerPoint to make sure that the page numbers were not changed. This was one of the most difficult thing in our project, because it is really hard to correct what you had written and what you had already finished doing.

We finished our final project about an hour before class. We had made edits and corrections at all of our free time to make it perfect, and the final product comes out wonderful. The reason we chose to make a project like this, was to create a fun game that everyone could get involved, and also to make this project relate to academic work. We had learned that teamwork is really important while doing a group project, because everyone has the responsibility to contribute as much as they can. I think our project comes out pretty good; everything is stated clearly and the additional plot seems to be very reasonable. The game is academic and interesting, and meanwhile closely related to the plot of the novel and even accompanied with our own imagination. Everyone seemed to be involved with the game, and I believe that they love it very much. The only thing that we could have improved is that, when the players are playing, it might be a little bit boring without visuals and feeling from other senses such as hearing. Maybe we could add some sound effects and even BGM into it to make it more interesting. Overall, I think we did a fantastic job and the whole project is a success.