TA Simulator

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  Assignments to mark

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  Textbook to refer to to mark assignments and respond to student queries

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  Angry student (top left)

Inspiration

TAs often go unnoticed and unappreciated. They sit in classrooms every week, waiting to help eager students. Only to spend the whole class sitting there quietly, as students never ask any questions during class. They then work unpaid hours answering questions that should have been asked in class on Ed, and remarking assignments for students who are delusional to think they did any better. In summary, the life of a TA is hard. Most have only dreamt of living this tough and unfulfilling life, but most could never stoop this low. This is where TA Simulator comes in. With TA simulator you can experience all the hardships of being a TA ad free!

What it does

TA Simulator is your very first game centred solely around the daily lives of your TAs. You’ll experience assignment marking, ed post replying, assignment remarking and more! Play now to experience if the life of a TA is for you!

How to play

In this game, you will be getting a series of assignments to mark. Refer to the information in the textbook tab to make sure you are marking it correctly. To mark the assignment, click on the rubric with the specific score you believe it should get and click confirm according to the criteria. Scoring wrongly will result in the students getting angrier. Also beware - if you suspect it's written with ZlatGPT, make sure to report it! Meanwhile, there will be student questions in the exstem tab. Make sure to answer these quickly or they'll get angry!

How we built it

• We made TA Simulator with the Unity game engine using C#. Unity's in-built UI was used for all interactive elements.
• All art assets were made on Procreate and Paint.net.
• Images for the assignments and textbook were pixelised with Paint.net.

Challenges we ran into

Time was scarce for the amount of gameplay and features we wanted to add to TA Simulator. We just barely didn't have enough time to fix a couple of bugs with the assignment marking. We also didn't have time to write spontaneous student queries.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We think that our idea is a unique and entertaining way of presenting the often arduous life of TAs.

What we learned

We learnt that we should set clear expectations and achievable goals that can be met within the strict timeframe.

What's next for TA Simulator

Firstly, we plan to squash the last few major bugs. After that, TA Simulator will undergo further updates in the far future. We have many plans for new features that would add another layer of immersion to the game, including:

• An email section where you may get warnings from upper uni management
• A better looking anger meter
• A wage that you can earn to purchase upgrades e.g. extending the time available to mark assignments / reply to student queries with coffee.
• Ability to go on strike
• Random events that suck up pay:
  • Students may send you their homework file - if you open it, you get a virus (you need to replace your computer and you lose money)
  • Student asks you for remarking
  • One of the higher ups has a party - you must spend money to buy a present

Stay tuned for more realistic TA simulation!

Built With

• c#
• paint.net
• procreate
• unity
• word