GDC 2022 Educators Summit: Strategies for Creating Productive, Healthy Student Teams
The best games are cohesive, engaging experiences. The process of making them should be as well. Instead, many of our student project teams are plagued by so many communication and team dynamics issues that projects stall and some students even grow to dread any type of teamwork. In my undergraduate programming classes and graduate game development process class, I’ve adopted three strategies to help students proactively build healthy, inclusive environments where they can all contribute to the best of their ability. As a result, I’ve seen students build better games with less stress and uncertainty - even when working 100% remotely. While the depth and details vary for undergraduate vs. graduate teams, the overall approach is the same and can be applied to any team-based course element.
Attendees will take away a set of core strategies to facilitate building healthy, inclusive student project teams as well as details about how to enact these via additions to the team formation, peer evaluation, and grading process.
This talk is for educators, students, mentors, and anyone interested in how to help students learn to create positive, healthy environments in order to have more productive team experiences. No prior knowledge is assumed beyond a general familiarity with the use of team projects in coursework.
Acknowledgements
- RIT MS GDD Lead Capstone Advisors:
- Elouise Oyzon, M.F.A.
- Christopher A. Egert, Ph.D
- My graduate teaching assistants and research students:
- Nicholas Bazos, RIT MS GDD ‘21
- Kyle Weekley, RIT MS GDD ‘22
- Mililani Rosare, RIT BS NMID ‘22
- J. Scott Hawker, Ph.D., Software Engineering, RIT
- & a LOT of RIT-IGME 106, 601, 680, & capstone students!