Tank Game Assessment |
Annamae Lang |
with Allan Easton |
|
January 2000 10:32 AM 1/20/00 |
The assessment instrument is a two-piece rubric that assesses the students' efforts on a scale of 1 to 3. The first rubric is a peer-evaluation of the class' programs; the second is a teacher evaluation of the internal code. The program will receive a 70% if students have met the basic criteria that were required. Students must receive a level 1 on all pieces of the teacher evaluation to receive a pass.
The rubric is an assessment instrument which allows for creativity and does not limit the students to being marked solely on programming structure and accurate use of processes.
Critical:
To determine the comprehension level of students with regards to processes and the capabilities of modularity.
Important:
For students to experiment with creativity and not to be held back by tight constraints.
Desirable:
To have students learn the importance of teamwork and communication.
Grade 12 Computer Studies (DSC 4A); the lesson is written at an advanced level for use with the unit on Modularity (Procedures and Functions) and Processes.
I allowed the students to choose which game they wanted to create. In this way, each student group had their own concept of how the game would develop. I felt it unfair to give them a mark based on who I felt had "the best" game.
The rubric does not assign a numerical mark, but rather each level assigns a range. Level 1 (all complete) is 70%, Level 2 (all complete) is 80% and Level 3 (all complete) is 80%. Since each group may have completed more than one level in their final product, there is the ability to obtain a higher mark based on what extras were included.
The assessment is done in two parts: A peer assessment by each student, and a code assessment by the teacher.
Each group was given time to play one round of the game in front of the class. They could discuss, or show, any extras to the game they had developed. The other students filled out the evaluation sheet. The teacher evaluated the code of the programs after the students had handed them in, using the second rubric.
Download the rubric here. (A Word 97 file.)
Each game that was produced was unique in its own way. Every group had developed certain aspects of the game that other groups did not think of, yet all were exceptional submissions.
The very basic games would include only boxes for tanks and no mountain (as the rubric shows). I have included one game from my class submissions for viewing. (Note that there were only four submissions, as my class consisted of 13 students.)
| This is an Object Oriented Turing (OOT)program. It will run if loaded into OOT. |
The beauty of this assignment is that it really shows the creativity of the class. They quickly understood the use of processes and how modularity helped to ease programming. Each student really had a different concept of how to approach this, giving varying levels of creativity but amazing results!
The students learned the power of creativity and individuality in this assignment. Not everyone had the same solution to the problem, but everyone had the same problem solved. Each group, as the development of the game came about, discovered that processes made the game easier to play, and allow for multi-player action.
Another lesson learned by the students, was teamwork. It was important to have more than one head to come up with an idea (or enhancement), but also when it came to testing and debugging. Another discovery was how much easier it was to solve the problem when you could break it into pieces (modularity) and put it back together at the end.
Next time, I would identify more specific things to look for in the code (as I was not the one to mark the code). I would be able to see which things appear this time (or did not appear) in the code, and then make modifications to the specs I have included in this rubric.