Reflection

What did I find to be the most useless/boring/misguided/off-topic/badly taught concept in CSC318? How could this be improved?

While I did find most things interesting, I don’t think what follows is exactly off-topic/badly taught but is rather unintuitive in the way we get to apply our knowledge.

In both the continuous project as well as the third assignment we basically must design a prototype or an interface at the very least. While this course is called “The Design of Interactive Computational Media”, it makes sense but while the concepts we learn are good and all, we’re still expected to use external tools to create these interfaces. If someone had no experience with an image editing program like Photoshop/Gimp/Whatever it would be rather difficult to create these mock ups.

It would obviously be unintuitive to only, for example, explain your design in words for both the student and the grader. But when something has to generally “look good” for the most part, it can be difficult having to try and apply the concepts we learn while having to learn how to use a tool to create the mock up (I mean there could be an entire course based on learning how to edit in Photoshop depending on the depth of its content). I mean a sketch with explanations is hardly sufficient when the thing is supposed to be aesthetically pleasing. I mean look at Krug’s Laws of Usability, a user wouldn’t want a sketch with notes and have to think about and read what each part does or is intended to do.

As a result, it is a difficult problem to solve. We learn the concepts in order to understand and be able to design things well but creativity requires an outlet. One can imagine of a grand design but what will they do if they lack the ability to execute it themselves.

The learning of tools is unfeasible to be taught in the course but I honestly don’t think there’s a way to fix this since there’s so many key things to learn already.