How to motivate game design/development students to do more than the minimum on homework I'm a teaching assistant for the upper level under-graduate courses for Game Design and Development at my University, and the professor and I are having a hard time finding a way to motivate students to:


Actually complete and turn in their homework on time.
Attempt to do more than just the bare minimum.
Listen to feedback for on-going assignments.


We have tried things like offering a bit of extra credit for turning it in on time or going above and beyond on the assignment, but as you can assume the only students that actually get that extra credit are the ones that are already excelling.

These classes are built around building a strong portfolio, but what generally comes out are projects that I wouldn't even want to include in my portfolio. Generally about 15% of the class are students that do work that deserve an A, and the rest is split fairly evenly between a C and an F (F's generally fall around 30% for these students). 

I appreciate your feedback and thoughts, hopefully with the help of this community I can help motivate these students to excel.

Edit: Adding more to the 3rd bullet above. They have an assignment one week, and they get feedback on what they need to do to improve their marks. However, they ignore the feedback and end up losing the same amount of points they did the previous week for the same problem.

Edit2: Answering some comments here. This is in the United States and they are working in C# with Unity3D. The class has pre-requisites that do funnel nicely to the content, because they start with just learning the basics of C# then they learn more complicated computer science concepts in C# all while learning simple game design using gamemaker, which can essentially be a drag and drop tool. It isn't until around the second semester of Sophomore year that they start using Unity3D. As for the games they are creating, please feel free to take a look at my portfolio: http://ryandarras.weebly.com/examples-of-work.html. 
These are games I made throughout my undergrad, and while I'll admit I'm a big nerd that probably spent way too much time on my homework because I enjoyed it, I would expect a resemblance to this quality in their games. Homework is also given with a very detail description of the requirements, as well as the exact rubric that is used to grade the assignment (the rubric is as objective as we can make it).
Something I wasn't sure about when I was reading your post was if the problem is whether the issue is if students lack motivation or if they lack the ability to succeed in your course.

If 30% of your students are consistently failing your course, then I genuinely do have to wonder if the latter is the case. If so, I'm not sure this is a  problem you can easily fix within just within the context of your course. 

For example, I'm assuming the students are expected to complete a few pre-reqs before they can take your course. Why aren't those pre-reqs adequately preparing your students? Etc.

If the students are genuinely under-prepared and have "given up" and are just going through the motions so they can graduate, then the best fix is probably to try and systematically repair your entire department. Perhaps that might mean finding more ways to add in support (especially in the intro courses), making sure students know where to find support, raising the bar on core classes...

It could also be the case that the pre-reqs listed for your course aren't actually enough, and that you need to add another pre-req class or two to make sure your students are prepared.



If it's the former (your students are capable but simply aren't motivated), then here are some thoughts:


  We have tried things like offering a bit of extra credit for turning it in on time or going above and beyond on the assignment


Offering extra credit for going above-and-beyond is entirely normal and expected, but I think offering extra credit for turning assignments is counter-productive: it sets the expectation that turning in assignments late is ok, further normalizing that behavior.

In fact, if you're lenient about lateness, it would be stupid for a student to not take advantage of that leniency. The student is probably pretty busy/juggling a bunch of classes and other responsibilities, so naturally they'd want to use whatever advantage they can get.

Instead, I would institute a strict no-late-work policy (perhaps with some mild leniency -- give students a fixed number of late days they can use or something).


  Attempt to do more than just the bare minimum.


Same sort of thing as before -- if you're a busy student, then it makes sense that you'd do only the bare minimum needed to pass the class. In particular, the students probably aren't thinking of the work they need to turn in as the "bare minimum": they're probably thinking they're turning in exactly what's expected.

In that case, one thing you can do is to raise your expectations. Make the assignments harder, or (if there's room for creativity on the assignments) show students examples of good projects other students have completed in the past. Maybe tell students that they're required to complete at least one item from the "above and beyond" section (though they're free to chose which one they want to do). 

You can also perhaps try motivating the students in other ways by explicitly telling your students that the purpose of this class is to help them build a portfolio they can show employers so they should put their best foot forward.

Making the assignments more interesting, as ctrl-alt-delor suggests, would also help. Making your assignments group-work might also help (and help partially compensate for the added difficulty).


  Listen to feedback for on-going assignments.


Getting students to listen to feedback is always challenging. I would first double-check that:


You aren't overwhelming the students with feedback -- if you give too much, they tend to ignore it altogether (I learned this the hard way).
The students are actually aware that they're given feedback, and that they're expected to read it. I'm not sure how exactly you're returning feedback, but if it's through some website, perhaps that website's UX is bad.
They're aware that the feedback contains info they're supposed to apply/contains warnings of things you're going to continue deducting points for.


Beyond that, I suggest telling the students about the "growth mindset vs fixed mindset" thing, as ctrl-alt-delor expects.

A somewhat more blunt tactic would be to modify each assignment (apart from the first one) and ask students to answer a question about their feedback -- something like "Summarize the feedback you were given on the last assignment. How did you apply what you learned while reading that feedback on this current assignment?". Basically, force them to at least think about their feedback, instead of avoiding it.