Assignment 1 is a short, individual project meant to acquaint students with the Unity development environment and developing for VR. Students are tasked with creating an experience around the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The design documents provided below are to help them identify a specific message and then craft an experience around that message. For assignment 1, we ask students to complete these documents and turn them early so that we can review their plans and provide guidance as necessary.
Topic Identification
Social Good and Message Identification
What is the social good initiative your project will address?
What is the non-profit organization that is working to improve the social good initiative?
What is a message the non-profit organization is using to address the social good initiative?
Experience (max 1 paragraph each)
What is the goal of your experience?
Describe the three minute user experience.
VR Design Document for Project 1
Experience (max 1 paragraph each)
What is the goal of your experience?
What is the messaging frame you will employ?
Describe the three minute user experience from the user’s perspective.
Technical
List the 3D models are part of your scene and identify how you are finding/creating these 3D models
For each object, list the
properties and behaviors
the controls that change those values
How is the user represented in your virtual environment?
How does the user interact with the objects in your world?
User uses _(INTERFACE)_ to manipulate _(PROPERTY/BEHAVIOR)_ of _(GAMEOBJECT)_ in the virtual world.
Assignment 2 Templates and Documentation
Assignment 2 pairs student developers with product owners (POs) who have a story to tell in VR. The students work in teams of four for 10 weeks. The development period is concluded with a demo day, where the students and POs gather to show off their work and a best project is chosen by the audience members. Assignment 2 requires the use of several Agile and Scrum concepts, so listed below are documents we have used to review the students' application of these concepts. In order to scale for larger class sizes, many of these documents are screenshots, videos, or templates that can be graded quickly.
Trello board updates (due weekly) An example Trello board is located here. The primary method of managing the projects is the Trello board. We ask students to take screenshots of their entire boards to demonstrate the following:
Board tickets should be in a user story format for most items. Use cases (tasks) should be reserved for very certain items (2 points)
The most important tickets are at the top of the backlog (3 points)
Grad students are required to demonstrate that tickets had been sized in addition to being in user story format
Stand-up Minutes (due weekly) A template for stand-up minutes. Students should have stand-ups twice a week, so we ask each team to turn in evidence of two stand-ups once per week. Each student should provide an update on what they did, what they plan to do, and what is blocking them.
Teammate evaluations (due bi-weekly) These evaluations are done on a bi-weekly basis (per sprint). Each student on a team fills these out every 2 weeks. In the quiz (administered via Canvas and automatically graded based on completion), each student evaluates each of their teammates on their contributions during the sprint.
The form consists of the following questions for each student:
Student name
Please rate this teammate's contribution to the project on a scale from 0-10.
Please describe this teammate's contribution to the project this sprint. What was completed? Were there any areas that were completed particularly well?
Please describe how this teammate could improve their contributions for the next sprint.
YouTube videos (grad only) (due bi-weekly) For each sprint, each team with a grad student is required to submit a video of one person from the experience's intended audience trying out the latest shippable software version. The video should be no longer than two minutes. The first 30 seconds is intended to give a brief intro to the experience, while the last 90 seconds should show the audience member using the VR experience and providing feedback.
Action items (due bi-weekly) Action items are a list of specific changes the students could make to improve their teamwork/project each sprint. These items are intended to be identified during the in-class retrospectives and turned in shortly afterward.
In the biweekly meeting with the PO, the students should discuss the following:
Review the work done by the team from the last sprint (last week)
Create new user stories with the PO
Agree upon acceptance criteria for the highest priority user stories
Team commits to the work to be done for the sprint
PO Google Form (due bi-weekly) A sample version of this form is included here. The results from this form are used for the PO graded portion of the final project. This form should provide feedback into whether the PO's expectations/needs are being met with the students on a regular basis. This form was sent directly to the POs and did not require any feedback from the students.