The title above is an old saying that I'm reminded of this time of year, as some students are now stumbling toward either dropping out or flunking. Sometimes the problems are practical (finances, transportation), sometimes they come from being in too many classes (which can be solved by dropping out of one or more), but often they occur because the student is his or her own worst enemy. That is, the student has the brains and sufficient time (if managed properly) to succeed, but not the WILL.
One of the most disappointing things that can happen to a teacher is to lose students. However, a teacher can only provide suitable conditions for learning; no one can "make" someone learn in a democratic free society. So the teacher leads the student to the possibility of learning, but if the student won't do it, it won't happen.
Sometimes students just disappear, and sometimes I can see what's coming but no amount of talking or helping can make enough difference. The teacher cannot do the work for the student. Some of the students who lack the will come up with myriad excuses why they cannot do what they need to do, others just... don't do it.
In general there are three groups of students: those who do the required outside-of-class work on time, and usually do it well; those who don't do any required work, which almost guarantees failure; and a third in-between group, who may do some things and not others.
Roughly speaking, the first group also shows up to every class, the second group misses many classes, and the third in-between group is unpredictable in their attendance. (Remember, attendance is generally the best predictor of success in college classes.)
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Saturday, October 6, 2007
My "Advice about taking a test"
The following is advice I give to students. It encapsulates my philosophy about test-creation almost as much as about test-taking, so I'm including it here.
Advice About Taking a Test
L. Pulsipher
I am NOT trying to trick you with questions. Trick questions are pointless and serve no purpose. Poorly worded questions can always appear to be tricky, but I try hard to avoid that.
Answer the question. Simple advice, but sometimes people talk about this and that but not about the question! Some teachers tell people, “if you don’t know the answer, talk about something that’s close to the topic, and if you’re right I’ll give you some credit.” Not here. If you have a problem to solve at work and you know the solution to some other problem, it doesn’t help, does it? Nor will it on a test. Having said that, I’m infamous for giving half and even quarter credit for an answer.
If the question includes a comparison or contrast between two things, be sure to address both of them in your answer--don’t discuss one and assume we all know about the other, because the test grader can’t assume that.
Don’t beg the question--that is, don’t give as an answer a reworded version of the question. For example, if you’re asked why such-and-such is true, don’t answer that such-and-such is true (even using different wording): say WHY.
In most cases (other than multiple choice and true-false) use complete sentences, or at least complete phrases. On the other hand, if the question specifically asks you just to name three of something, listing those three will be good enough.
Finally, always remember that as I grade test I have no idea who is giving the answers. I may know, from talking with you, that you know such-and-such, but if it isn’t on paper (or in the computer), it doesn’t count.
Advice About Taking a Test
L. Pulsipher
I am NOT trying to trick you with questions. Trick questions are pointless and serve no purpose. Poorly worded questions can always appear to be tricky, but I try hard to avoid that.
Answer the question. Simple advice, but sometimes people talk about this and that but not about the question! Some teachers tell people, “if you don’t know the answer, talk about something that’s close to the topic, and if you’re right I’ll give you some credit.” Not here. If you have a problem to solve at work and you know the solution to some other problem, it doesn’t help, does it? Nor will it on a test. Having said that, I’m infamous for giving half and even quarter credit for an answer.
If the question includes a comparison or contrast between two things, be sure to address both of them in your answer--don’t discuss one and assume we all know about the other, because the test grader can’t assume that.
Don’t beg the question--that is, don’t give as an answer a reworded version of the question. For example, if you’re asked why such-and-such is true, don’t answer that such-and-such is true (even using different wording): say WHY.
In most cases (other than multiple choice and true-false) use complete sentences, or at least complete phrases. On the other hand, if the question specifically asks you just to name three of something, listing those three will be good enough.
Finally, always remember that as I grade test I have no idea who is giving the answers. I may know, from talking with you, that you know such-and-such, but if it isn’t on paper (or in the computer), it doesn’t count.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Even little games take a lot of work
I've just read an article in PC Gamer that cites six months and six people to program a cell phone game, Orks & Elves 2, with a little help from famous game programmer John Carmack. They were limited to 300K (not M or G), though I'm not sure whether that was storage space or RAM.
Modern video games are incredibly large
A recent GameInformer magazine described the budget and related parameters for an "A list" console game (I cannot recall which game or platform.)
Budget:
10% marketing
8% testing
15% design
20% art
30% programming
etc.
(Sorry, it was a student's copy of the magazine, I didn't write it down at the time, and I could not access it online--so this is from memory.)
There were 1,767,000 line of code in the game. Let's get a handle on this. A single-spaced normal page has 54 lines of text. Let's round that down to 50 because some program lines will be longer than the width of the page. 100,000 lines, then, is 2,000 pages of text. A million lines is 20,000 pages.
So let's try a million lines. How long would it take a typist, typing 50 words a minute, to type 20,000 pages of text? A line is about 13 words. Let's call it 10 to account for short lines. Then each page would be 500 words, or 10 minutes. 20,000 pages is 200,000 minutes. That is 139 days of typing 24 hours a day.
Actually, 50 words a minute is optimistic; code is much harder to type than normal text, and must be completely without typos or it will not work.
Now consider that this code must actually be written (created) and tested, which takes immensely longer than mere typing. Nor can we have people working nonstop for 139 days. And this is only just more than half the entire game program, since we did only a million lines.
Now add in the time for creating the artwork. Generally, at least twice as many people work on art as on programming.
So now we've covered just half the budget!
In contrast, we have three hours of lab a week, times 16 weeks, or 48 hours (really less than that considering breaks). So what are the chances that we, in a one semester class, can even scratch the surface of creating an A-list video game? Nil, nought, nada, infinitesimal: none.
The days when one person could create a well-known video game ended around 1990. And even then, that person took much longer than both our game design classes combined, in an era when graphics were primitive and everything was much simpler.
There's a saying, "you can't get together nine newly-pregnant women and have a baby in a month." In other words, some things just take a long time, no matter how badly you want them to happen faster.
This is why I tell people, if you want to learn to create good games, you need to use non-video games, where you can get to a playable prototype in a short time, not in "forever". Until you have a playable prototype, you haven't done even 20% of the work.
Be sure to read Ian's comment to this post, as he has the full figures and makes an interesting comparison to numbers of semesters of work involved.
A related post explores the percentages of work done.
October 26: I have worked on this further and made a set of slides (a rarity). The file is linked here.
Budget:
10% marketing
8% testing
15% design
20% art
30% programming
etc.
(Sorry, it was a student's copy of the magazine, I didn't write it down at the time, and I could not access it online--so this is from memory.)
There were 1,767,000 line of code in the game. Let's get a handle on this. A single-spaced normal page has 54 lines of text. Let's round that down to 50 because some program lines will be longer than the width of the page. 100,000 lines, then, is 2,000 pages of text. A million lines is 20,000 pages.
So let's try a million lines. How long would it take a typist, typing 50 words a minute, to type 20,000 pages of text? A line is about 13 words. Let's call it 10 to account for short lines. Then each page would be 500 words, or 10 minutes. 20,000 pages is 200,000 minutes. That is 139 days of typing 24 hours a day.
Actually, 50 words a minute is optimistic; code is much harder to type than normal text, and must be completely without typos or it will not work.
Now consider that this code must actually be written (created) and tested, which takes immensely longer than mere typing. Nor can we have people working nonstop for 139 days. And this is only just more than half the entire game program, since we did only a million lines.
Now add in the time for creating the artwork. Generally, at least twice as many people work on art as on programming.
So now we've covered just half the budget!
In contrast, we have three hours of lab a week, times 16 weeks, or 48 hours (really less than that considering breaks). So what are the chances that we, in a one semester class, can even scratch the surface of creating an A-list video game? Nil, nought, nada, infinitesimal: none.
The days when one person could create a well-known video game ended around 1990. And even then, that person took much longer than both our game design classes combined, in an era when graphics were primitive and everything was much simpler.
There's a saying, "you can't get together nine newly-pregnant women and have a baby in a month." In other words, some things just take a long time, no matter how badly you want them to happen faster.
This is why I tell people, if you want to learn to create good games, you need to use non-video games, where you can get to a playable prototype in a short time, not in "forever". Until you have a playable prototype, you haven't done even 20% of the work.
Be sure to read Ian's comment to this post, as he has the full figures and makes an interesting comparison to numbers of semesters of work involved.
A related post explores the percentages of work done.
October 26: I have worked on this further and made a set of slides (a rarity). The file is linked here.
Percentage of time spent on various stages of a game
In a non-electronic game, the time spent by the designer and developer (this is sometimes two different people) is approximately:
10-15% Design
10-15% Prototype production and initial testing to arrive at a full set of rules that works. Most of this time is spent on the rules, not the physical prototype
75% Development: playtesting and revision
For an electronic game the percentages are different. I confess for electronic games I am "pulling these out of the air", they are estimates, and undoubtedly will vary greatly from one company to another.
10-15% Design
60% Production of a developmental prototype (this is very time-consuming)
15-20% Playtesting and revision of that prototype
10% Testing for programming bugs
This is "actual", not desirable. Blizzard works with no deadlines because they can easily self-fund projects. They can say "the game will be released when it is done". Most likely they spend more time on a game than the typical development studio, and a lot of that additional time is spent on playtesting and revision of the prototype. So their percentages would be different. This is the way the game ought to be made, but few companies have the track record of success and constant influx of royalties that Blizzard enjoys, so they can't afford to do it that way. This helps explain why so many newly-released games are seriously buggy.
We have to be careful about the word "prototype". Electronic game prototypes are often very limited versions of a game produced to get some idea of what it will actually be like, and are part of the design process; they are then discarded and work begins on the actual game, which ultimately arrives at a "developmental prototype" that can be turned into the game that will be sold.
10-15% Design
10-15% Prototype production and initial testing to arrive at a full set of rules that works. Most of this time is spent on the rules, not the physical prototype
75% Development: playtesting and revision
For an electronic game the percentages are different. I confess for electronic games I am "pulling these out of the air", they are estimates, and undoubtedly will vary greatly from one company to another.
10-15% Design
60% Production of a developmental prototype (this is very time-consuming)
15-20% Playtesting and revision of that prototype
10% Testing for programming bugs
This is "actual", not desirable. Blizzard works with no deadlines because they can easily self-fund projects. They can say "the game will be released when it is done". Most likely they spend more time on a game than the typical development studio, and a lot of that additional time is spent on playtesting and revision of the prototype. So their percentages would be different. This is the way the game ought to be made, but few companies have the track record of success and constant influx of royalties that Blizzard enjoys, so they can't afford to do it that way. This helps explain why so many newly-released games are seriously buggy.
We have to be careful about the word "prototype". Electronic game prototypes are often very limited versions of a game produced to get some idea of what it will actually be like, and are part of the design process; they are then discarded and work begins on the actual game, which ultimately arrives at a "developmental prototype" that can be turned into the game that will be sold.
Friday, September 28, 2007
High school methods won't work in college
In community colleges, the following kind of reminder must be repeated over and over before students "get it", and unfortunately some never do. The latter are usually gone before the second semester starts, sadly. This is roughly the spiel:
"College is not high school. You can't fail to turn in work and expect to get a decent grade; you might not even pass. What you could get away with in high school won't work here, among other things because in high school the teachers and schools get blamed if kids don't learn, whereas in college it's the student's fault. The teacher is there to give you every opportunity to learn, but cannot force you to learn anything.
This is, of course, much more like the real world than high school is.
I'm told that the graduation rate of my entire school is 17% (about 1 in 6). There are lots of ways that statistic can be modified, but it makes the basic point: students have to work at what they're doing in order to get a college degree. That degree will serve them well down the road, but only if they work to get it.
What might have excused you at some high schools will not excuse you in college. 'My computer died' won't work, because there are computers on campus (in open lab, in the library, in ILC/Guided Studies/whatever it might be called at a given school). 'My car died' won't work for long, any more than it will in your job. 'I had to work' is a matter of time management. 'I can't afford the book' is rarely believable. EVERYone can find ways to save time and money if they really want to; virtually no one is right at the edge, though many think they are. It is very difficult to do reasonably well in school, work a lot at a job, play video games or watch TV hours a day, and still make it. Something's got to give, and if school is what gives way, then you'll be one of those who are gone by second semester.
You have to take responsibility for yourselves, folks. School is, in a sense, your job internship. If you miss deadlines when you're making games, it may cost your company large sums of money--and could cost you your job. Get used to deadlines. Don't give excuses, give results."
But this often goes in one ear and out the other. I try to help people get used to this regime as much as I can, but in the end I can't hold 100 hands for months. People have to get with the program and do it themselves.
Millennials (Gen Y) have much different attitudes toward school than earlier generations did, which makes this entire situation much more difficult. Typically (there are of course many exceptions) they want an "easy button", they don't think practice is necessary, they want convenience, they expect to get something for nothing, and they're inclined to quit if the going gets tough. No wonder graduation rates are so low.
"College is not high school. You can't fail to turn in work and expect to get a decent grade; you might not even pass. What you could get away with in high school won't work here, among other things because in high school the teachers and schools get blamed if kids don't learn, whereas in college it's the student's fault. The teacher is there to give you every opportunity to learn, but cannot force you to learn anything.
This is, of course, much more like the real world than high school is.
I'm told that the graduation rate of my entire school is 17% (about 1 in 6). There are lots of ways that statistic can be modified, but it makes the basic point: students have to work at what they're doing in order to get a college degree. That degree will serve them well down the road, but only if they work to get it.
What might have excused you at some high schools will not excuse you in college. 'My computer died' won't work, because there are computers on campus (in open lab, in the library, in ILC/Guided Studies/whatever it might be called at a given school). 'My car died' won't work for long, any more than it will in your job. 'I had to work' is a matter of time management. 'I can't afford the book' is rarely believable. EVERYone can find ways to save time and money if they really want to; virtually no one is right at the edge, though many think they are. It is very difficult to do reasonably well in school, work a lot at a job, play video games or watch TV hours a day, and still make it. Something's got to give, and if school is what gives way, then you'll be one of those who are gone by second semester.
You have to take responsibility for yourselves, folks. School is, in a sense, your job internship. If you miss deadlines when you're making games, it may cost your company large sums of money--and could cost you your job. Get used to deadlines. Don't give excuses, give results."
But this often goes in one ear and out the other. I try to help people get used to this regime as much as I can, but in the end I can't hold 100 hands for months. People have to get with the program and do it themselves.
Millennials (Gen Y) have much different attitudes toward school than earlier generations did, which makes this entire situation much more difficult. Typically (there are of course many exceptions) they want an "easy button", they don't think practice is necessary, they want convenience, they expect to get something for nothing, and they're inclined to quit if the going gets tough. No wonder graduation rates are so low.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
What predicts success in class
A couple years ago I listened to a keynote speech at a NC community college system conference (statewide teachers conference) by a gent who had visited 1,600+ colleges to learn how things were done.
One of the things he talked about was the best predictor of success in college classes.
It is not SAT scores or "IQ".
It is not high school grades.
It is not family history.
It is not family income.
It is how well the student attends classes.
This matches my experience. It is worth telling students, who often have the notion that they can miss class and not really miss anything. (Students will thoughtlessly insult the instructor by coming up and saying "am I going to miss anything by leaving an hour early"? Or, "did I miss anything when I wasn't here Tuesday?" What, we often don't do anything important in class?) I tell students at the beginning of a course that I talk about a lot of things that aren't in any textbook, and that we do a lot of hands-on or group activities. These are things that cannot be "made up", especially in our age when students are inattentive and frequently don't write down any notes. In the past I usually included in the tests questions that were easy to answer if you were in class, but not easy if you weren't (and so hadn't participated in the problem-solving sessions). This semester I have "canned" tests (which I strongly dislike, as they tend to be tests about the textbook rather than about the subject), but I intend to work questions about problems we encountered in class, and discussions we had in class, in there some way.
Obviously, I don't teach the way some classes are taught in universities, where the professor walks in, lectures (all one-way) to a few hundred students, and never even learns their names. There the students can get recordings of the lectures and know almost as much as if they had been there, and some schools produce podcasts of lectures for that purpose. I try to discuss things with students, which doesn't translate well to podcasts, though I sometimes record myself using my Sansa MP3 player. Younger students, in particular, strongly prefer interaction during class, rather than "lectures".
One of the things he talked about was the best predictor of success in college classes.
It is not SAT scores or "IQ".
It is not high school grades.
It is not family history.
It is not family income.
It is how well the student attends classes.
This matches my experience. It is worth telling students, who often have the notion that they can miss class and not really miss anything. (Students will thoughtlessly insult the instructor by coming up and saying "am I going to miss anything by leaving an hour early"? Or, "did I miss anything when I wasn't here Tuesday?" What, we often don't do anything important in class?) I tell students at the beginning of a course that I talk about a lot of things that aren't in any textbook, and that we do a lot of hands-on or group activities. These are things that cannot be "made up", especially in our age when students are inattentive and frequently don't write down any notes. In the past I usually included in the tests questions that were easy to answer if you were in class, but not easy if you weren't (and so hadn't participated in the problem-solving sessions). This semester I have "canned" tests (which I strongly dislike, as they tend to be tests about the textbook rather than about the subject), but I intend to work questions about problems we encountered in class, and discussions we had in class, in there some way.
Obviously, I don't teach the way some classes are taught in universities, where the professor walks in, lectures (all one-way) to a few hundred students, and never even learns their names. There the students can get recordings of the lectures and know almost as much as if they had been there, and some schools produce podcasts of lectures for that purpose. I try to discuss things with students, which doesn't translate well to podcasts, though I sometimes record myself using my Sansa MP3 player. Younger students, in particular, strongly prefer interaction during class, rather than "lectures".
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
