Final Reflection

This class made me benefit in so many different ways, even in my major. Architecture needs creativity which I  kind of lacked; this acted as a motivation for me in the beginning of the semester and made me want to register for the Creative Thinking and Problem Solving course. I figured that I benefited a lot by the end of this course, specially from the last two projects. The content of the course helped me develop more and find my weak points and tried to develop them. The last project which was the game design was the most interesting one in my point of view. We, as a group, did research on mathematical games for children aged between 8 and 12 years old, we also interviewed some of our family members who are in the same age range. Working with my group was fun; however we found troubles trying to meet up since it was finals week. Moreover, I believe that my presentation skills have also developed as I noticed that I was not as nervous as I usually am while giving presentations. The whole process of creating the game was fun and interesting, I was put in the game designer’s shoes and I figured that working on a game needs thinking in all the dimensions and not only one, because at they end they all connect to the same point in the end. The hardest part in my opinion was creating the scenarios and creating difficulty levels, because it is hard to know what the player thinks while reading the scenario or how the player would understand the scenario since it can be misunderstood by some players; that is why we tried our best to make them as clear as possible for the player to understand them. In addition, I also found it difficult to create the game manual as they are children and explaining a game on paper is hard to children in my point of view, we had to mention every detail for them to understand the game properly. On the other had, the design thinning project was very interesting as well, the group and I chose to create a chair for people diagnosed with ADHD. I personally think that we did not give in the best of what we had, creating the prototype was the best part of it because we thought that it was impossible to create a chair out of basic materials. In a nut shell, it was a great semester with two of the best professors on campus, Dr. Sherif Osman and Dr. Riham Niazi, I benefited a lot from them. I believe that restringing and choosing this course in the beginning of the semester was a very good choice and I definitely do not regret it by any means.