Technical Writing for Software Engineers

Levine, Linda; Pesante, Linda; Dunkle, Susan B.

doi:10.21236/ada636493

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…The skills learned from these exercises are also useful for future technical communicators in a wide variety of online or otherwise digitally-mediated situations outside of games and game design. We know from the literature that iteration and prototyping are being used in emerging domains such as user experience design (Laroche & Traynor, 2013; Redish & Barnum, 2011) and have long been a part of writing for software engineers (Levine et al., 1991). However, even more globally, current trends in education, business, and leisure suggest that media at large will continue to become more interactive and gamified.…”

Section: Three Game-based Tactics For Teaching Technical Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Game Design Tactics for Teaching Technical Communication in Online Courses

McDaniel

Telep

2020

Journal of Technical Writing and Communication

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This article describes an interdisciplinary, partially online honors course entitled Video Game Theory and Design. The article reviews the literature surrounding video games and technical communication and then outlines the learning objectives for the course. The authors describe individual and team-produced assignments and suggest game design techniques for motivating students. We explain how we assess different projects, including oral game pitches and the complex technical Game Design Documents that are students’ final deliverables. Finally, we discuss how game design techniques provide new perspectives on writing and generate new possibilities for technical communication assignments. We close by proposing three tactics that are useful for teaching technical communication students in hybrid and fully online courses: (a) nonlinear association for creative thinking; (b) team-based assignments for writing and editing using game-based tools; and (c) iterative prototyping and playtesting for multimodal production. Each tactic is contextualized using examples drawn from the field.

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Section: Three Game-based Tactics For Teaching Technical Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%