Effect:

The modules were clearly explained and the engaging story helped motivate the students to work on the project. The students appear to have greatly enjoyed the exercise, particularly the creative background story that provided the context for their work. By reviewing other people’s code, the students learned more efficient ways of performing the given task. They also became familiar with other modules in the system, allowing them to help each other to a greater extent during the implementation of their game project.

Suggestions for improvement:

Peer review of modules for identical tasks made it easy for students to copy and paste code they did not understand. Due to cases of plagiarism exposed during the project defense, stronger reminders about academic honesty are advised. Acceptable and unacceptable behavior should be defined. Alternatively, the assigned challenges could be similar enough for the common patterns to emerge but yet different enough to engage each student and make that student an “expert” on a topic his or her classmates did not fully tackle. Overall, working on multiple modules gave students a better appreciation of the different parts of a graphics engine and helped them learn how to write cleaner and more efficient programs.