Conclusions:
Over the course of the project, concepts that were learned in class were applied to the project work being done. Learning concepts like team managements and technical writing are most effective when done through a project like this. Additionally, a project of this scale is best done with teammates. This is because each teammate brought a specific skill to the project which allowed the team to assign tasks to make individual workload more manageable and produce a higher quality product. An example of this is with the documentation: Madison’s unique artistic skill came into use while making the game’s posters. Art is not normally a skill people think of when they think of engineering but the diversity of our team allowed us to reach all the requirements of the project together.
Technical communication is a skill that many in Fundamentals of Engineering have to work on developing if they want a future career in engineering. This project serves as a final demonstration of the team’s skill in technical communication. While documenting this project was difficult and time consuming, it has been interesting because the team is documenting something that we created and care about deeply. This level of passion allowed us to connect to the writing and communicate best on this project compared to others in the past.
Recommendations:
Although our team was successful, this project could be redone to be more efficient and produce better games. A change we would make would be to use function files instead of one large script file as that would allow us to repeat some game functions that reoccur. Script files would be especially helpful for Yahtzee as the dice rolling mechanism is the same for all 13 rounds.
The biggest limitation that was faced was using commands that were not taught in class, like displaying cards in Memory or using multiple breaks and rolls in Yahtzee. In order to work the cards for Memory the team had to learn a new set of card-specific commands and how to use them. Learning how to use other code from outside of class is an important skill that we developed. If we did this project again, we would be able to seek out new and relevant knowledge and understand it faster by reading its own documentation and testing it out.
One of our largest successes as a team is our time and project management. Overall, it would be highly recommended that other groups plan out the basis of what their code will look like before they begin(pseudocode). This helps organize the project and breaks it up into smaller pieces, avoiding the last minute rush to finish everything the night before.