Midterm Retrospective - GDO710 - Week 6
There is no Research, Development or Activity journal this week. This week is a little break before we jump into the next rapid ideation. We should use this week to consolidate our work and reflect on the progress made.
So far the transition from working and returning to student life is tough. It is a lot harder than I thought. Writing these learning journals is very time-consuming, I find that the more I write them, the more I enjoy them! It's just the act of finding the time. I'm going to break my Midterm retro into the 5 domains to ensure that I am structuring my reflection better:
Dispositional domain:
Overall my time management thus far has been poor.
Somehow, multiple different life events decided to converge in the same 6 weeks. Thankfully things are starting to settle down now and I should get more time to work on the projects required for the unit. I need to ensure I revisit some of the previous weeks and do the class activities, I missed the first couple of weeks and it's been playing on the back of my mind.
Overall, making games again has increased my motivation. I really miss sitting down and working in Unity. Creating something which is purely my own is a nice change from the years of working on commercial projects with little impact on major change.
Affective domain:
I started this degree feeling very stressed and anxious about what to expect. As I have progressed I have started feeling a bit more relaxed, but still stressed. There's so much to do and making time is difficult for me. To further add to that, I am still uncertain if I have structured my learning journals correctly. That being said, I feel as if they are getting better with each entry.
I am not looking forward to the 2000 word-final assignment for this term, however, I'm pretty sure I have written more than 2000 words so it should be a cakewalk. (Hopefully)
Interpersonal domain:
I contributed to this week's lecture and started to ask peers for feedback on my journals. I have addressed this domain in detail towards the bottom of the page under the "Webinar" section.
Cognitive domain:
I believe my most recent approach to writing my journals is far more beneficial to my learning than how I was doing my journals before.
Last week I decided to change up the format, when I sit down and go through the lectures, I will write the information for my journals at the same time. Previously I would do it after the fact. I noticed that my latest journal was more detailed and contained more personal thoughts than doing them 1 week or sometimes 2 weeks late.
I think that this small change will drastically increase the amount of information I absorb per week and will positively affect my time management as a result.
Procedural domain:
In the past, time management has actually been a major strength for me. I love planning out my day in my bullet journal and tracking my time to be efficient. But since moving, starting the unit and a new job. That has gone out the window.
I need to ensure that I am getting my life back on track! I feel like slowly I am getting settled into everything and finding a rhythm. Here's to keeping that rhythm and getting back into managing my time effectively.
Start items:
Dedicating a day in the week to exclusively work on my master's.
Dedicating some time on the weekend (At least 3 hours a week).
Dedicating a section in my weekly journal for the weekly webinar. (This will help me address the interpersonal domain of reflection)
Returning back to the webinars, they have been clashing with prior commitments at the moment.
Stop items:
Stop leaving the learning journals
Not seeking enough advice on my journals and work so far.
Not showing off work because it's not finished.
Continue items:
Working on learning journals while going through the weekly content
Attend the webinars when possible.
Weekly Webinar
This week's webinar was fun! Sadly at this point, I didn't have a working build as I had some errors in my code (story of my life), but! I did get the opportunity to review and reflect on my peer's projects.
I really enjoyed Gary's project. He took the theme of death and created a small game where you must collect berries in a casual-top-down game. If you pick up any items which are not berries then you will take damage and die. The idea was to get the highest score.
You can find the link to his blog and MAC build here.
The original intention for this game was to be on mobile and I posted some feedback on the forum which might be useful for further development.
My favourite out of all the projects had to be Nicolas's paper prototype.
Before I had seen the demo, in the previous webinar we discussed how he has never made a game before and wanted to explore a different medium. The outcome was inspiring! I love the concept of the game and how well it was executed! (It was a major success in comparison to my paper prototype).
We spoke about the game in the webinar and there wasn't much feedback! It ended up being a good representative of what the game was supposed to be and if this was given to stakeholders then it would represent a large majority of the game. My only comment would be to keep working on it!
It was great having the chance to review everyone's work. It's very interesting to view how other people interpret themes. I interpreted something completely different and they all managed to have a finished outcome!
References:
Falmouth (2022) Week 6: Open Forum and Webinar. [Falmouth University teaching platform] [website]. Accessed xx July. 2022