February 15 - Met with Diane Cresto at Mt. Pleasant High School to discuss project.

February 17 - Met with Professor Roger Blumberg to discuss project proposal, different types of multimedia tools, etc. Finished writing project proposal.

February 24 - Group meeting to brainstorm story ideas.

February 29 - Went to Mt. Pleasant to meet the kids, discuss our ideas with them, and gauge how they respond.

March 2 - Group meeting to discuss structure of game. Decided on episodic structure with varying levels of difficult for each episode. As a result, every unit of game is self- contained but moves a general narrative forward to the "final showdown" with villian. We believe this is a good way to engage the student, get them interested in these grammar exercises.

March 7 - Another meeting to finalize our story ideas. We've decided to do an adventure type game involving an agent (the player) from a secret organization whose duty is to fight a villian trying to take over the world. We feel that because these kids are older (16-18), they're sophisticated enough to desire a strong narrative. Despite the fact that their grammar skills are poor, they are often very familiar with games, television, media sources.

March 9 - Group meeting. We decide that the best way to incorporate grammar into this game is by having "tools." For example, a time travel machine that only works if you use future and past tense correctly; a teleporter that takes you where you want to go, but only if you're able to capitalize proper names/locations. Each of us go off to create several episodes for the next meeting.

March 16 - In the morning, we goto Mt. Pleasant High School to meet with Diane and the kids again. We tell them about our ideas for the game and they all seem very excited about it. We ask for input, and they provide us with possible themes to center the episodes around.
In the afternoon, we meet again, this time with potential story ideas. We decide how to integrate the various grammar components, talk about characterization and story arc, and set a schedule for meeting times over the weekend, pre-storyboard presentation.

March 16 - In the morning, we goto Mt. Pleasant High School to meet with Diane and the kids again. We tell them about our ideas for the game and they all seem very excited about it. We ask for input, and they provide us with possible themes to center the episodes around.
In the afternoon, we meet again, this time with potential story ideas. We decide how to integrate the various grammar components, talk about characterization and story arc, and set a schedule for meeting times over the weekend, pre-storyboard presentation.

March 23 - We present our storyboard to our class: part I, part II, part III. After our presentation, our classmates had some excellent questions and suggestions for us. These questions included:

What method of evaluation are you going to include?
Is the game deterministic? That is, once a student defeats one episode, is there any incentive to playing it again?
Will the questions be the same every time?
Is it possible the students would find the game too childish?
Are you taking into consideration racial and sexual stereotypes?
Would it be easy to add, change, or delete episodes?
Are the different grammar exercises (punctuation, tenses, capitalization) differentiated? What if a student does well on one aspect but not on another?

All of these questions were extremely insightful and offered us new perspectives. Some of them were issues we had already thought about and debated over; others were thing we hadn't necessairly discussed. As we continue working on this project, we will strive to keep all of these issues in mind.

April 4th - Back from spring break, we start thinking about the implementation of all of our ideas and planning our course of action. We meet to create a preliminary schedule and start dividing up different parts of the forseeable labor for the project.
Also, we get back comments from Diane based on the storylines/storyboard that we had shown to her. She sounds encouraging, saying that she thinks the stories are engaging and the reading levels and exercises are very appropriate to her class and offers her input on the individual storylines. Later in the week, we will meet with her again to discuss more concrete details, prospects, and concerns we have.

April 6th - We meet with Professor Blumberg today to get feedback on our storyboard presentation. His main concern is that the scope of our project is too ambitious. He advises us to start building modules of our project, set deadlines for ourselves, and start thinking about scaling down aspects of the program. We agree to have a working demo of the first episode ready for him by Tuesday, April 18th. We leave the meeting determined to get started right away.

April 6th - 18th - We divide up responsibilities for working on episode one, accomplishing the following tasks:

Set up FTP for filesharing.
Write up in-depth script for episode 1.
Create exercises for episode 1.
Finish drawings for episode 1.
Create authorware structure for the flow of the episode.
Create director animation files for every scene.
Set up final interface.
Import animation files from director to authorware.
Program the functionality of the grammar tools.

April 18th - We run into a big problem when we realize that Authorware 4 does not import Director 7 even though they are both products of Macromedia. Unfortunately, we are not able to present a demo module to Professor Blumberg. We decide to create the entire software in the more powerful and compatible Director.

April 22nd - We finish a demo of the first episode and are able to show it to Roger. There are some glitches with it involving playback speed and the Captialization tool. Nevertheless, we are happy and relieved to have it done. We start on producing content and creating the rest of the episodes.

April 22nd - May 1 - We are working hard on assembling the episodes. We determine that our goal is to finish 4 episodes plus the grand finale episode set in Italy (which is considerably more intricate). We also decide on the functions we will include with the game, which are:

Ability to enter user name and have it carry through the game.
Score Keeping.
Ability of the user to choose the gender of their representation and have it carry through the game.
Saving the user's progress.

May 1 - We go to Mt. Pleasant High School to demo our work for Ms. Cresto and her students. We accidentily made our playback speed too quick, but other than that, it seems to go over well. There are tiny technical glitches which we take note of, but the program runs surprisingly well on what looks to be the oldest computer in the school. The students respond well and provide us with some suggestions. They tell us that the level of the texts in the game is appropriate (which we were concerned with), that they want a soundtrack to the game (with the options to turn it on and off), and they want every piece of dialogue read (which we are not going to implement). Some pictures from our user testing session.

May 2 - We demo the intro sequence, episode1, and episode2, for our CS92 class. Everything goes well and we get some helpful feedback and suggestions.

May 8 - We finish assembling the various components of the game.

May 8 - Proofreading and debugging, making sure everything links up to each other, exporting everything into Projector form.

May 9 - We install the game at Mt. Pleasant, demo the final product for our CS92 class, and celebrate!