Form and Function of Teamwork in the Course

In this section, Professor Eric Klopfer describes how teams form and function in 11.127J Computer Games and Simulations for Education and Exploration. He also shares his insights about the importance of having students reflect on how their teams functioned, as well as how he approaches grading when students complete projects as teams.

Forming Teams based on Interest or Area of Expertise

In this course, we let students choose their own teams. For each of the projects, students brainstorm ideas in groups and then as a whole class. During this process, people advocate for different topics. We settle on typically four or five topics and then people decide what team they want to be a part of based on their interests or areas of expertise. It’s rare for teams to form based on friendship clusters.

Typically, students form different teams for the non-digital and the digital game projects. Occasionally, a team will take the same idea for a game from non-digital to digital, but this is often problematic, because the game usually becomes just a direct translation of a non-digital game to a digital game. To think about what’s unique and interesting about the digital space, teams really need to start their game development process from the beginning for each project.

Using Teams to Balance Skill Sets

Students come to the course with different levels of technical experience. In fact, we don’t require that any of the students have programming experience prior to the course. We structure the curriculum such that teams build their non-digital games before their digital games. This prevents students from becoming bogged down at the outset with what’s realistic to accomplish digitally. Working in teams allows the digital games to become possible because each team ends up having a few people with technical experience. Occasionally, we’ll shuffle team members to achieve a good balance of skill sets, but usually this happens naturally as students form teams based on their interests or areas of expertise.

Prompting Students to Reflect on Teamwork

After each project, students individually submit reports on how their teams functioned. Usually students’ reports are boilerplate: everybody worked, everybody contributed. But sometimes they’re not, and that allows us an opportunity to intervene. We think about the upcoming project and ways we might need to shuffle the groups to make sure those personalities don’t conflict again. If the feedback suggests that a student was struggling and not contributing sufficiently, we think about how we can support that student so that his or her challenges become less hindering during the next project.

Grading Projects Students Complete as Teams

We assign each person on a team the same grade, and then adjust that grade for each person based on his or her team members’ assessments of his or her contributions. Occasionally, team members will say that a student was particularly heroic and we might raise that student’s grade, but usually, it goes the other way. For example, team members might provide feedback that a student didn’t finish a part of the assignment, or didn’t show up for group meetings. We lower that student’s grade and pull him or her aside to talk about the need to be an equal participant. This is important, especially after the first project, because it provides an opportunity for the student to improve and to do well on their team during the second project.

I don’t always remember to tell students in advance that they will evaluate their team members’ participation and contributions, and that this evaluation can impact their grades, but I should. Oftentimes just knowing this will happen prevents students from free riding.