Ongoing Investigations

Category: Project Planning

  • What Do I Need (In Order) to Learn?

    Alas, my hopes for the Agile tutorial were for naught: the sections on Scrum, Extreme Programming, and Kanban were all explanations of the mindset and values behind each practice, without much explanation or examples of the actual process. Part of it might have just been that they were too wide in scope, but I came away feeling more like I’d been listening to an extremely redundant sales pitch than a demonstration. There’s some interesting reframing of concepts, but otherwise…

    It does have me thinking, however, about online education, since LinkedIn Learning tutorials have been around since way before the pandemic (though they used to be called Lynda back when I was a freshman). Why have some of the courses I’ve taken been effective, and others haven’t?

    Different courses I’ve taken (that I remember) include: this Agile Foundations tutorial, an introductory course on project management, and a lot of small one-off lessons on video editing for various CAMS classes.

    The Agile tutorial had only two practices which it explained in clear detail, with visual aids: the swim lane diagram (a board with organizational sticky notes which showed up in both a general process explanation, and in the Kanban unit) and a game called Planning Poker, where each person individually estimates the amount of effort it will take for the team to complete a task, reveals their guesses, and then discusses why they thought that. There weren’t any exercises to prompt engagement, and there were a lot of issues with redundancy, repetitively unclear terminology, and overlapping concepts (one phrase that came up all the time was something like “Now, <this term> is a term from Scrum, and I use it because Scrum is one of the most popular Agile frameworks, but you don’t need to use this term, you could say something else”… even though Scrum and its terminology were part of the second-to-last unit in the video, so I had no clue what was going on).

    The introductory PM course had very little to do with mindset or philosophy, and a lot to do with practices. It also asked for engagement in a way I thought was very effective. The broad-strokes outline of the course was to write down everything that had to get done on sticky notes, create a flow-chart with the sticky notes of what had to get done when, estimate times and costs, and turn it all into an actionable chart. The videos made a point of saying “Pick a project you want to do, and then do all the steps with us as we go”, which made it easy to be invested in what you were doing and follow along, but you couldn’t pick up any individual part as a lesson.

    The one-off lessons were extremely hard to be invested in. They were part of larger courses that had exercise files for you to follow along with, so that you could edit stock footage and audio and see clearly what the instructor was doing, but this also meant that you didn’t really care about the project. They worked well for two- or three-minute tutorials, which was all we needed them for, but I don’t think I could see myself willingly sitting through a full course.

    These all seem like pretty obvious statements — actionable information > vagueness, emotional buy-in > boring exercises — but I’m hoping I can use this for self-teaching and for thinking about different disciplines. Some disciplines are very actionable, but hard to personalize; some can appeal to personal goals, causes or interests, but be sort of vague in their application. I need better, different strategies for each.

  • ‘2D Game Kit’: Day 2 (& Other Projects in the Pipeline)

    Went through the back half of the 2D Game Kit (teleporting to another scene, and the video walkthrough). The video walkthrough was interesting — about half of it was information that had been covered partially or completely in the written tutorial, another 25% was inferrable, and the rest was basically new. For example respectively: monsters and how to fight/mod them; the fact that you can set up damageable obstacles and break down objects in your path (the written tutorial only covered damaging monsters, but it works the same way); and how to add items to your inventory and trigger dialogue popups. Still, I don’t think the redundancies were a bad thing, since working through a tutorial by yourself and having a game designer talk through her thought process both lay out two different and useful perspectives. Also, one noted difference between the 2D Game Kit and the Kart modding tutorial – the 2D Game Kit came with a lot of art assets, which I couldn’t change the color or look of easily. In the Kart mods, it was pretty simple to adjust the albedo on any given asset, which weren’t usually art/images.

    Other plans today: get a jump on “Getting Started with Unity”, and maybe look into some project management frameworks I’m not familiar with (specifically, Agile). The Getting Started tutorial looks like it’ll have some redundancies for me — I already worked through go-kart modding, I’ve tooled around a bit with the FPS intro project, and I have at least passing familiarity with the Unity editor by now — but there may be some new tidbits.

    Re: Agile, I’m passing familiar with the concept, but I don’t have a lot of experience with how to apply it properly. What I’m hoping is for better information on how to set up those sorts of recurring, multi-step processes (or whether Gantt charts can be extended easily and intuitively into an Agile framework, because I like Gantt charts a lot).

    This’ll teach me to look ahead — I started poking through “Getting Started with Unity” and it turned out that a lot of it was geared specifically towards the sorts of streams I already worked through with ‘Your First Game Jam’! I’m now wondering whether to work through the FPS and platformer exercises, though I’m planning to skip the kart modding section… but maybe it would be more worth it to move on to a different tutorial?

    As for Agile, I ended up going through a LinkedIn Learning tutorial on “Agile Foundations” that has been pretty disappointing so far. There’s some good information about Agile’s values and mindset, but most of it is evangelizing. I’m hoping there will be more actionable information later on, in the section devoted to Scrum, Kanban, and something called Extreme Programming (!).

    Overall, a pretty scattered day, but I feel like I at least got information I can use in a couple different areas.

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