Coaching an Oregon Games Project Challenge team November 14, 2015 Peter Steinfeld –

2 About me  Professional software developer at IBM  Manage two small software development teams  Coached OGPC teams from Hillsboro High School in 2013 and 2014

3 OGPC Main Event  Contest in Salem in April or May  Three judging criteria 1.Game 2.Presentation 3.Questioning by experts

4 Organizing your team  Get help from a teacher  Recruit team members  Arrange transportation to the main even and a space to meet  Get a technical expert  Pick a time and place to meet  Communicating with your team  Get everyone’s address  Get a central place to post information, Google Docs, for example

5 Running the project with Agile Development  Agile Development is used at IBM, Intel, Google, …  Assign roles to all team members  Product owner – interprets winning criteria  Scrum master – scheduling and “to do” list  Developers – coding, art, sound effects, …  Other roles -- Test master, Presentation master, Artist, Sound effects expert, Music master, Blogger  Divide the project into fixed time iterations  Deliver and test at the end of each iteration  Have a retrospective and planning meeting  One month is a good iteration duration

6 Running the project with Agile Development – continued …  Keep a “to do” list (AKA backlog)  Anyone can create a "to do" item  Each item has  An owner  A description of the "done" criteria  Gets declared "done" only when reviewed by someone else, preferable the creator  At each meeting, have a scrum  Everyone talks and answers the three questions 1.What did I do since last meeting? 2.What will I do next? 3.Is there anything stopping me from doing what I want?

7 Testing with Usability Testing  Have someone else use your product and observe the results  Do this at the end of each iteration  Performing usability testing  Create something to test (game, presentation, expertise)  Recruit the testers (gamers, teachers or parents, software experts)  Create tasks for the testers (play the game, observe the presentation, ask questions)  Prepare the testing environment (set up a game where it can be observed, set up a presentation environment, supply the experts with questions)

8 Testing with Usability Testing – continued …  Run the tasks and observe the results  Tell the testers that we're testing the game, not them  Tell the testers you want feedback on how to improve  Ask them to talk about what's going on in their heads while they test  Run the test -- observer and take notes  Consolidate the observations and create "to do" items

9 Developing the game  Pick a game development platform  Unity, GameMaker, Scratch (MIT), Minecraft, Stencyl, Twine, RPG Maker  Create a prototype early and improve on it  Game development roles include coders, visual artists, sound effects people, musicians

10 Dealing with kids  Have the kids do all of the work – coding, scheduling, presentation -- everything  Make sure that everyone has a role and a task  Focus on the goal and how to test it

11 My 2015 OGPC team  Seven team members, me, my technical expert, and a teacher sponsor  I functioned as the Agile coach and manager  Unity as our game development platform  We used GitHub issues and waffle.io for our backlog  We blogged on Tumblr  We won the “Professionalism” award

12 My 2015 OGPC team  We had three iterations – February, March, April  At the end of each iteration, we had a usability test session  Brought in high school kids to play the game  Brought in teachers and parents to see our presentation and give feedback on its clarity and interest  Brought in professional programmers to ask us about our coding techniques, our software tools, and our development methodology

13 My 2015 OGPC team  Our GitHub repository -- Lemons/OGPC-2015  Our “to do” list --  Our blog --

14  Thank you for participating  Contact me if you need help -- 