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Saturday, May 28

Module Reviews

AY15/16 Sem 1

NM4227 - LAJ1201 - CS4249 - CP3201 - CP4101

Whew! Sorry I've been super busy sorting my life out here in the States.

These are the modules I took last year. Since I took them a considerably long time ago, I might not be able to recall too much detail.

As usual you can find my semester files here.

NM4227 Playable Art
In this module, you learn about art games, do readings and make art games.

For an NM module, it was a little more on the heavy side with 3 reflections, 1 essay and 2 projects (also depends on how much you have to carry your team).

I had a super fun time! My two game projects, "Marry Lah" and "Despairity" were showcased in the NM art exhibition, Random Blends

And as usual, since Alex (the bestest NM lecturer) was teaching it, everybody was in good hands.

Assessment

Basically your projects are 60% of your grade and the rest depend on your essays.

Lectures
Lectures are very relaxing especially towards the end where you get to playtest everybody else's games. Just go with the flow

Essays
I always did badly in Alex Mitchell's essays so what I did this time was ask him many questions about his requirements. I ended up doing pretty well for the reflections and artist essays.

In the case of my game artist review, I split my sections into About artist, About their games, Thesis Statement, Analysis of 2 Games (further split into Gameplay, Artist Intentions, Critique), and Conclusion. My artist this time was Gregory Weir, and my thesis statement was "The mix of interactivity and textual narrative in Weir’s games, if not well integrated, could hinder the player’s experience."

If you're going to take this module, choose an artist that has games on newgrounds/kongregrate. Why?? So you can use the online comments section as evidence to your critique.

PROTIP: Always update your teacher on your ideas and drafts. Not only you get tips and a better feel of what they want, think of it as extra word count. When your teacher starts to grade your work, they already have an idea of what you're going to write. I believe it makes them think your work is easy to understand, but in actual fact, you've already explained your ideas to them before, and their mind will fill in information automatically.

Projects
As usual, groups in NM modules are randomly assigned (yay)

Project 1 is a board game. My team had lots of fun designing and playtesting our game, Marry Lah, which basically favours married couples inside the game just like how Singapore gives benefits to married couples but not singles.

We had to submit the board game and a copy of game rules.

Project 1 Board Game

Project 2 is a computer game. Since I was the only programmer in my group I programmed the game. It's the first time I didn't have to do the art too! Honestly the artist did a really great job. The producer was also really hardworking and took care of the submissions and presentations for us. The designer was nice to work with as well.

You can play our game HERE.

Project 2 Computer Game

What I loved most was getting to play other people's games!
10/10 recommended module.

Final grade: A+

LAJ1201 Japanese 1

Assessment

CA (formula not released)	75%
Final exam	25%

I had such a great time in Tokyo

... So, I ~~made the mistake of taking~~ took this module.

If you've had little to zero experience in Japanese like me, you'll find the workload to be medium-heavy. (Heavy, if you're an arts student lol)

Class participation is important. Before every tutorial, you're required to complete homework exercises in the homework packet, and memorize a japanese dialogue. There is also a quiz every lesson which means you'll be memorizing ~30 new vocab every week. The homework, quizzes and participation add up to 75% of your total grade. So if you're a quiet student like me, you'll lose a bit of points

The final exam consists of oral, listening and written assessments.

Everybody dies in the listening quiz in the final - don't worry, your suffering is short. My friends' advice was to listen to the recordings given with the textbook. Don't just watch lots of anime - that didn't work out for me.
For the oral, you must familiarize yourself with the kaiwa (会话？) in the textbook. The stuff tested is more or less what you hear in the recordings given with the textbook.
For all written exams including the midterm and final, the most important book you should study is the Grammar helper book (the light pink one). The textbook can be largely ignored.

Final grade: B+

CS4249 Phenomena And Theories Of Human-computer Interaction

Assessment

Assignment 1: AutoComPaste - Experiment Design and Analysis	25%
Assignment 2: Fitts Law, KLM, Cogtool	25%
Class participation	10%
In-class quizzes	10%
Final exam	30%

As a UX Designer, this was one of the most useful modules for my career. If you want to be a UX Researcher, this module has everything you need.

I learned about proper HCI user research and experiment processes.
I picked up R for statistical analysis.
I picked up Cogtool to analyse the efficiency of interfaces.
I learned useful stuff about humans such as memory, task modeling, biases, heuristics - things you should think about when designing interfaces.

The assignments are quite time consuming - especially the first one, where you need to plan an experiment and get ~6 people you know to help you test an application. The experiment is very repetitive and boring for your tester, so you pretty much owe your testers big time afterwards

The final exam is very doable if you study the material well and do past year papers. Make sure to attend the revision session because it will make you aware of some tricks they put into questions.

Final grade: A-

CP3201 Industry Seminar
This is an ungraded module - you either get Participation (2MC) or none. I took it because I was short of a few points to graduate.

The talks are interesting because people from different industries - health startups, banks, traditional software engineer companies - will come and talk to you about their work life. Of course this is their way to entice you to join them but it is a good opportunity to network if you're interested.

"Join this module if you want to find out about all the jobs you DON'T want to have later on in your life" - a friend of mine

I skipped most of the talks but I still got my 2MCs.

CP4101 B.Comp. Dissertation
This is your famous FYP that spans two semesters.

However, you have to bid for your topic in Week 7 of the semester before. Remember to pick a good supervisor and most importantly a topic you have interest in. You have to spend one. year!!!

Some of my deliverables:

Efficiency analysis

Prototypes

Wireframes

Even though my FYP was heavy and I was so burnt out at the end, I got to research, design and code an entire app. To me, that's an accomplishment and I learnt a lot from my mentor :)

Alrighty - I have to sleep!! Going to visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium tomorrow to see penguins and deep sea creatures

#byeresponsibilities

Labels: CP3201, CP4101, CS4249, design, fyp, LAJ1201, module reviews, NM4227, NUS, NUS module reviews, school

Sunday, April 24

i just ate hello panda

need shorter posts
Gahh!! I've got a lot of things to say; my life is headed in a different direction than I thought it would head months ago.

But I'm making an effort to make my posts shorter instead of each post being a long word-vomit. I care about my blog's UX.

schoool stuff

FINSIHED MY FYP REPORT AND PRESENTATION!!!

Two potential investors after I presented it during the FYP Innovation Award pitch!

Presenting at STePS. (photo credit)

I didn't win but I made friends with the other presenters and they're cool people!

just chilling

latin american fair

After the FYP report submission, my friends and I went to Big Box at Jurong East, lay on all the beds, sat on all the sofas and rocking chairs, and stumbled upon a Latin American fair where we got free wine, which we drank while sitting on a rocking bench. It was chill, it was perf.

Soccat, the faculty mascot I designed, is now in 3D. This is my legacy lolol I am very proud.

My fam

My friends are really into this series of party games called 'Jackbox Party' available on Steam. If you've got a group of friends, I completely recommend this group game. Only one person needs to own it.

You get to stare at your phone and not interact with anyone, yet you're interacting with everyone by playing this game. PERFECT.

One of the games, Fibbage, involves making up ridiculous lies and getting people to believe you. You get to learn interesting facts along the way. When someone chooses your lie, you feel so proud of your lie-baby.

family update

my mom

My mom's discharged from IMH, but now she is refusing to go for appointments, take medicine or allow home visits. She promised to do those.

She's listless and depressed right now and just stays home all day and my dad is absolutely against sending her back anymore. He lies to IMH that she is fine. On a positive note, she stopped picking up trash from rubbish bins. IMH also made her clean up their house a bit. Actually, my dad did the clean up while my mom did nothing as usual.

I don't really care or want to. I'm not expecting much change anymore. My dad is content and I don't want to push it. Who knows if she will return to her old behaviors? If they are content living their life in squalor (e.g. house that is never cleaned, boxes piled everywhere) then okay. I've got my own life to live too.

I also can't say IMH dealt with this perfectly. Was there a need to ward her for 2 months, and only send a doctor to tend to her once a week? What is the purpose of making her stay there doing nothing? While she was there, why didn't they send therapists to speak to her about her depression? So, I can't even defend them.

house cleanup

One good thing that came out of this was, a social worker from IMH brought her church cell group to help us clean up one of our houses! There were around 20 people. Huisuan and my bf also came down to help. Lovely, kindhearted people that I'm forever grateful to!

The volunteers

We filled up two entire containers, they cost $650 each.

Huisuan posing with some stuff we've thrown out

Before

After!

My dad was supposed to find someone to rent it but it hasn't been rented out though.

It's okay. I'm chill and have been marathoning many kdramas.

Labels: family, fyp, house, school, soc, soccat

Monday, January 18

Posting for no reason

I ❤ taobao
I was feeling pretty crappy, but after I bought things on taobao I feel like I've got something to live for. *wakes up* *checks if items have shipped*
I feel like taobao is the entire reason I was destined to learn Chinese.

I get to buy so many more things and it saves me a lot on shopping because I no longer spend money when I'm outside. When I see something I like I will whip out my phone and search for a cheaper version on taobao. I'm going to be the reason behind the collapse of brick and mortar shops D:

I buy mostly clothes, cute things and household items

life stuff
A pharmacist from IMH called me and said they were going to put my mom on this medicine which I looked up on wikipedia. Wikipedia says it is used to treat schizophrenia. Will be going to meet the doctor tomorrow to find out more.

--- ramblings about work and code below ---

So, I'm developing the app for my FYP now, learning Ionic, AngularJS and Meteor at the same time. And holy crap it is difficult and daunting. Even my bf has downloaded AngularJS reference apps in his phone and is learning for me.

I have grown a lot as a frontend developer the past year. I do not like this frontend development package manager stuff. Why can't we have GUIs?! Why must everything be done on the command line?

Maybe as a UX Designer, I should aim to design a smoother experience for frontend developers, to make the transition into frontend development easier for beginner programmers.

I made my first assignment for my students! Basically, I created a really crappy 100MB website and I gave my students tasks to optimize the website. And wow, this blog I made in 2009 violates so many web development practices. I don't even bother to optimize images here. LOL. May my students never discover my old websites and code ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I submitted my application for grad school. Crossing my fingers.

I have a new portfolio. I programmed really cool svg and css animations

And a better designed resume above, an improvement from my earlier one:

I am happy with my improvements in design and programming the past year. So I really hope I can continue to get better (in grad school hopefully). My dream is to really be a great user experience designer.

Labels: school, taobao, work

Friday, November 6

happy things

Thank you all so much for your kind words of encouragement. I attended my grandpa's funeral and went home to finish up my FYP report. I'm feeling better now. I think I will focus on my school work for now and worry about my family issues later.

Happy things
Here are some happy things that happened to me!