Collaboration

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Thomas Richardson’s Collaboration Reflection:

 

     For our Create Task project, Eli and I chose to make a Snake game. Our main collaboration method was via Zoom audio calls. These recordings can be found by clicking the link above. We chose Zoom as our principal collaboration method because everyone seemed to be talking of its benefits at the time of the start of this project, and we knew that it had a conversation recording feature. Personally, I found this method of collaboration to be the most effective form of virtual collaboration. The chief benefit of using Zoom is that it is relatively easy to use with only one other person and to record conversations on it in mp3 format. Additionally, it was very easy to show Eli computer-specific debugging errors, as all I had to do is to turn on Zoom’s camera feature for him to see a real-time look at my computer screen. However, Zoom has numerous downfalls. Once or twice, audio would not work for either Eli or myself. Additionally, as good as Zoom is at virtual collaboration, it is a far cry from working on a project in-person. In addition to Zoom, Eli and I wrote code on Repl.it. We chose Repl as our main code-writing platform because we were already familiar with it from previous coding projects. All things considered, it worked relatively well. As far as I am aware, it is the only free online code-writing program that both natively supports the Pygame module, and allows for multiple users to work on it simultaneously, which was critical for the successful completion of this project. However, it has numerous downfalls, including a long loading time when trying to run our program, as well as the fact that, far too frequently, the code editor that Eli and I were currently using would, for no apparent reason, crash and refuse to run our code again. When this happened, a completely new code editor would have to be generated on Repl, which cost us several minutes’ time at each crash occurrence. Our final collaboration method was via text, which was only used once, and was done out of convenience, as neither of were available for an audio call at that time. This was certainly a less than ideal form of collaboration, as code creation and debugging through collaboration was extremely limited. However, all things considered, Eli and I chose effective collaboration methods that allowed us to complete our project far ahead of schedule, as well as allowed us to take our project far beyond the initial parameters and goals that we set. 

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Eli Young's Collaboration Reflection:

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Over the course of Create Task project, Thomas and I used three main methods of collaboration when working on our Snake Game: Repl, Zoom, and texts. Repl served as our primary collaborative workspace, where we worked on all new features simultaneously. We chose Repl over a standard desktop IDE because it allowed us to see in real-time what the other was working on. This meant that for all other communications, we would not have to share the code every time we changed something, and instead simply talk through what we were thinking at any given time. Repl also allowed us to work from any computer. One downside to Repl was that the kernel of the project we were currently working with would suddenly crash without explanation and we would have to create a new project then copy the files over. This malfunction wasted a fair amount of time and hurt the overall project’s organization because it got hard to keep track of which project was which. Our primary communication for the project was over Zoom calls. We initially decided to use this because we were aware that the calls could easily be recorded and shared. Zoom allowed us to talk over problems we were having with the code and with the simultaneous use of Repl, we were able to quickly develop different iterations of the code. In addition to talking over zoom, we had the option to use video. This was helpful several times when there were issues on Repl and the code had to be put into an IDE for debugging and Thomas needed to show me his screen. The zoom calls were very easy to record and share because we could pause and stop the recording whenever we wished and select a myriad of media types. We had a few issues with poor connections and our voices being cut off but these were relatively limited. We also used texts to communicate once because we were unable to zoom call at the time. Texting about the project made it much harder to communicate because it takes far more time to comprehend a question or issue over text and then respond than it does in person or over a call. This meant we were constantly waiting on each other to respond and therefore had to wait before proceeding in the code. We were forced to solve the problems we ran into on our own which meant not only were the problems harder to fix, but also that for example if I fixed a problem alone, Thomas may have a harder time understanding my fix and may run into issues with it later on than if he had helped in making the fix initially. Despite this, we were overall quite happy with our selections of collaboration. The joint use of Repl and zoom made it very easy to communicate our ideas and iterate our code all through the project.

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