Reflective Writing – Post 3

For an upcoming assignment, our lecturer split us into groups of 2 and we have to work together until the assignment is finished which is due in January. Everyone found a partner eventually and I was the only one who didn’t and was left for last. This resulted in me ending up with the other last person who didn’t have a partner.

I got to admit that I didn’t really feel good about this, because truth of the matter is I would have much preferred to partner up with students whom I know I get along better with and students which I spend more time with and work well together.

The bad thing about this partnership was that I was partnered up with someone that when it comes to school, he doesn’t really give his best and leaves everything for the last minute when it comes to assignments.

Two weeks ago we had our first part of the assignment where we had to do our pitch presentation about what mobile application we were going to design, and I told him how we should split the work. I worked on my mobile app design while he worked on the web-server side. I informed him on what we should do and what was to be included in the web-server side and I assumed that he got the idea, but at the end we found out we had some discrepancies. What I should have done in this situation was not to assume anything and check the work he had done.

From day one, when we were given the assignment brief, I should have started looking for a partner which I know I would have worked better with.

If I get any more group projects in the future, I will take action on day one and will also never make any assumptions that what the other person did was good and up to standard, but rather check out for myself.

Don Miguel Ruiz (1997, p. 65) in his book The Four Agreements states ‘It is always better to ask questions than to make an assumption, because assumptions set us up for suffering’.

References

Ruiz, D.M. (1997). The Four Agreements. California: Amber-Allen Publishing, p. 65.

Reflective Writing – Post 2

In these four weeks, during our Critical Thinking lectures, we have been learning how to reflect on one’s actions in an attempt to become better in decision making. We have been following Schon’s model, who presented the concept of ‘reflection in action’ and ‘reflection on action’.

Reflection in action is basically when an event or activity is taking place and a decision is made instantaneously upon another action taking place at the time (Ed, 2017). An example of this which I experienced myself was when I was fouled during a soccer game and instead of claiming the foul, I took the advantage by quickly getting back up on my feet and managed to score a goal instead.

Reflection on action on the other hand is when an event or activity has happened already and one starts to reflect on that occurrence, for example during a soccer match, most of the time I am indecisive on what to choose when it comes to either passing the ball or shooting it, and exactly after I either shoot or pass the ball, I usually start to reflect on whether it was the right choice.

1. The action is what comes first and what actions were taken.
2. Then there is reflection which includes assessment of behaviour and the consequences of that action.
3. Revising the theory and what better actions and precautions could be taken next time to get a better result. This is called conceptualising.
4. Finally you re-apply the revised theory. (Learn.solent.ac.uk. 2017)

I am still a bit sceptical about whether this model improves my lifetime experiences, however I am willing to try and apply it to my everyday life and could only hope for a better outcome.

References

[1] Ed Batista. (2017). Experiential Learning Cycles. [online] Available at: http://www.edbatista.com/2007/10/experiential.html [Accessed 24 Nov. 2017].

[2] Learn.solent.ac.uk. (2017). Reflective thinking and writing: Schön’s model. [online] Available at: https://learn.solent.ac.uk/mod/book/view.php?id=2732&chapterid=1113 [Accessed 24 Nov. 2017].

 

Reflective Writing – Post 1

Four weeks have passed since I started school again. I am once again with the same class mates like last year so we are pretty comfortable around each other. We also know most of the lecturers teaching us, since they taught us last year except for one, Miss Tania Buhagiar. The subjects for this semester are Critical Thinking, 3D Modelling, PHP and Databases, App development and Game Design.

In my opinion, these subjects we have are all okay and each one of them teaches us something good, however at times when we are doing certain tasks, deep down I think that they are futile and serve no purpose in the way we are learning for when it is time to go out into the real world. An example of this is when we had a task in Game Design where we had to create a two player competitive card game that can be played in two minutes.

What I didn’t like about this experience is that I didn’t really learn or gain anything from it and was constantly thinking: “What a waste of time”. By constantly thinking this way, I actually wanted to get the game over with, so I didn’t really give it much thought and in the end I came up with a bad card game that was close to being “non-playable” which in turn made me feel pretty bad about myself.

It was really disappointing in the end when we went to present our games in class and saw that other students really took their time to come up with a good card game and I also felt embarrassed. I knew then and there that I could have come up with a much better game, had I given it more thought, which in turn would have made me feel better about myself.

When our lecturer gave us our task I should have worked harder on it and gave it more thought and planned it better so that in the end I would have come up with a better game myself.

If next time I get a task assigned by our lecture, I will definitely work harder and smarter on it so that in the end, I will not feel as bad about myself, even if I think that the task is pointless to our learning experience.

Gemstone Mining – Game 4

For this week, we were to create a non-violent version of the game ‘Battleship’ and also change its metaphorical meaning. I decided to make my game more rewarding and also faster to play than the actual game and came up with the idea of having Player 1 hide a set of rewards on the board and Player 2 needs to guess their location. The rewards I chose were in the form of jewels and different jewels have different points. The more rare the jewels are the more points that jewel contains.

 

Sapphire cost 1 points each

Emerald cost 3 points each

 

 

 

 

 

Ruby cost 5 points each

Diamond cost 8 points each

 

 

 

 

Onyx cost 12 points each

On the board there will be:

• 5 sapphires
• 4 emeralds
• 3 rubies
• 2 diamonds
• 1 onyx

The rules are simple:

• The first player will first put all the gemstones in random coordinates
• The second player will have to guess the coordinates and is allowed to call 10 coordinates and he/she can do this for 3 rounds
• Once a gemstone is uncovered and dug out, a new coordinate must be allocated for that jewel for the next round, however the ones that were not uncovered cannot change their coordinates.
• The total number of points are calculated and the player with the most points win

 

 

ThiefScape – Game 3

This week we were to create a game which shows a simple story through our gameplay. The first step I did was to think about how the game is going to be played and what mechanics I should incorporate in my game. After a bit of brainstorming, I decided to go with a sort of maze like game where a protagonist needs to venture through and make his way out. This maze would include a time limit and a lot of obstacles.

When I started designing the maze, I also started to think about what story I would like to represent. More so, who the protagonist and antagonist were going to be. I came up with the idea of having a thief being the protagonist and security guards as an antagonist.

After this, everything became more simple and knew what I had to do. The rules were simple:

• Avoid being caught by patrolling security guards
• Make your way safely to exit without triggering any traps or you get caught/die
• Get out before timer hits 0 or an alarm is triggered

As obstacles/antagonists, I decided to include the following:

A hidden pit fall

Patrolling security guards

 

Tripwire which triggers death traps

A bear trap

Spikes which kills when in contact with

Crates acting as obstacles

Brick walls

The final game looks something like this:

Lud(o)ic – Game 2

For this game, Ludo, I decided to add 2 additional resources and modify an existing one. For the first additional resource, I came up with the idea of having 2 spots on the Ludo game (orange arrows) (the spots on the Ludo game are decided by the highest x2 dice roll from each player playing Ludo) and the idea behind this resource is that when a player lends on it, gets to first choose any player of his choice (could be himself) to send himself/herself or another player back X number of steps back decided by the x1 dice roll.

Another resource is Portal. There will be 2 portals on the Ludo game as seen below (purple circle):  If a player lends on this portal, he/she decides a player of their choice they want to swap places with using the piece they used for landing.

 

The last thing that I decided to modify from the game was when a player lends on another player. To make things a bit more interesting instead of just having the other player that landed on another piece go back home, I decided that it would be a better idea if the players battled for that position by a roll of a dice. Highest number wins. Rest of the rules remains the same.

Deck Wreck – Game 1

The game Deck Wreck starts off with both players having each assigned a total of 6 cards. All cards will be faced down which is one of the rules of the game. 3 cards will be in-play while the other 3 will be out of play. The 3 out of play cards will be representing the life points of each player. The rest of the cards will be put separate.

This is the initial setup:

After deciding on who starts by means of sortition, the starting player chooses 1 card from the deck which he is allowed to view. After seeing that card, the player has 3 options:

1. The player can stick to that card and choose to attack the other player with it.
2. The player can choose another card at random instead
3. The player may choose to arm himself

The winner will be the one who has the highest number. A life point is lost to the one that loses.

If the player chose option a, a card of his choice must be selected from his opponent to attack it.

If the player chose option b, a random unknown card will be chosen to attack.

If the option was c, the player arms himself by taking a life point from his own deck and adding that card face down. When arming oneself, the next round the other player HAS TO attack the armed card.

Horus protection

Each player also has 1 chance at using horus protection. What this does is after a player initiates an attack, the player being attacked may merge 2 cards together to protect himself from the attack. If he manages to protect himself, he does not lose a life, the other player does not get damaged and the cards used for protection gets discarded and another 2 new cards come in play faced down. If however the horus protection won’t work, the player loses 2 life points instead.

 

Validating the website

For the last piece of the assignment, we had to validate our website through HTML5 and CSS3 validators and fix all errors that we found. The errors that I had were very easy to fix and most of them were the repetitious. These were the following errors that I had, as well as the solutions that I implemented to solve the errors:

 

Merchandise page

For the last page of my website, I decided to include a store with a set of different merchandise that a potential user could purchase. I opted for simplicity in this page and instead of having a row of 4 items like the original website, I decided to use 2 items per row and make the images a bit larger. As always I used a 12 column grid, but this time each image, text-content and button was to occupy 1/2 of the grid.

Original Runescape Website

My Website

I also made my images so that when a user hovers over them the mouse cursor changes to a pointer and the image opacity is reduced after a 0.3 second delay. I also wanted to make the images so that when the user clicks on them they get enlarged, however I had some aesthetic issues with this and so decided to leave them as is.

For the buttons I used a button element and when clicked, it shows an error page which I custom designed myself, since the shop is not functional. I kept the text and design of the buttons simple, but consistent with the colour scheme of the website. The original Runescape website used a green colour which was used only for the buttons which in my opinion didn’t match with the other elements.

All in all I was very happy with the final result and how my website turned out. Can it be further improved? Yes, but since this is my 3rd website I ever designed I’m really happy with the outcome

The Hiscores page

This page was pretty straightforward with not much of functionality in it for the simple reason that it contains a list of users which have their hiscores displayed. At first I thought about doing an unordered list <ul> and have each name listed down in a list item <li>, but after inspecting the HTML code of the old school Runescape website, I saw that it made use of a table and so I decided to use that instead <td> and <tr>, since it seemed to make more sense. For the table I also used a 12 column grid with each of the following content occupying 1/4 of the grid:

• Rank
• Name
• Level
• XP