Generally, I dislike giving an assignment that has little benefit for the learning outcomes. However, to start with, we need to do some things to get administrative matters out of the way. Since this is really prepatory stuff, I call it “Assignment 0.” It’s not that I always count like a computer scientist.
The purpose of this assignment is to make sure the infrastructure for the class is in place, and to begin some online dialog about games.
For this assignment you must do the following things. They all must be completed by noon, on Monday September 10. (noon on Monday is not a typical deadline for an assignment in this class).
- Have a look through the course web. In particular, read through the course announcement and the policies pages. Optionally, you might want to look at last year’s course web (since this year’s class will be very similar). If reading this stuff makes you want to drop, do so before completing the rest of this assignment please.
- Complete the Course Survey at https://uwmadison.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_0U55cW2tReZjt1r
- Make yourself an account on the class forum. Please use your real name, and a university email address to sign up. If you do not do this, we might remove your account thinking it’s a spammer. Choose your username such that it’s obvious who you are (for example, use your CS user ID), otherwise we might not associate your postings with the right person.
- Make (at least) two postings in the “Games and Design” forum. For one, post about some game that you’ve played recently. Say a little about it. For the second post, comment on a game someone else has played (other than the game in your first post). Hopefully, this is the beginning of a bigger discussion about games that we’ll all have together over the course of the semester.
Note: in general, posting to the discussion won’t be part of an assignment. We encourage you to participate in the discussion continually over the course of the semester. - Make a posting in the Assignment 0 forum, confirming that you’ve done all the previous parts. Give the names of the games in your posts for number 4. This post is likely to be pretty boring, but its here just to make sure the mechanics of handing stuff in works.
