Week 12: What Did You Actually Build?

A synthesis of measurement, control, expression and evaluation, and what each one contributes to a claim about how a jump feels.

10 May 2027

Question

You now have three presets, a reproducible measurement method, a single-variable comparison tool, and at least one observation of a real person playing something you built. If someone asked you “which jump feels best,” what would you actually be able to say — and what could you still not honestly claim?

Prediction (skip if you’d rather just look)

Before writing anything: can distance jumped, or whether a gap was cleared, settle an argument about which of two jumps feels better? If not, what would have to be true of a claim for it to actually settle that argument?

Experiment

Look back at your week 3 measurement table and your week 10 A/B comparison side by side. The first proves you can measure one configuration reproducibly; the second proves you can isolate the effect of one changed parameter. Neither one, by itself, tells you anything about whether a human enjoyed either result — that’s what week 11’s playtest note was for. Put together, they’re three separate kinds of evidence, and none of them substitutes for either of the others.

Explanation

This course split into four phases for a reason: measure established that a number is only evidence if someone else could reproduce it; control showed that gravity, launch speed, air control and the forgiveness windows are separable levers, each doing one job; express showed that posture is a completely different kind of lever, one that never touches the physics at all; evaluate showed that a fair comparison changes one thing at a time, and that a real observation of another person playing outweighs any number of your own confident guesses. A convincing final claim about a jump’s feel draws on all four — a measurement table, an isolated comparison, and a real playtest observation — and is explicit about which parts are measured fact and which are your design judgement.

Why "distance jumped" was never going to be the answer

Two jumps of an identical distance can differ in every property this course has spent twelve weeks distinguishing: airtime, forgiveness, redirect- ability, how the landing reads, whether a real player found it satisfying or fought with it. Collapsing all of that into a single distance number throws away everything the last eleven weeks measured.

Task

Write a two-paragraph outline of the final assessment’s justification section before drafting the real thing: one paragraph naming which of your three presets you’ll build the report around and why, the other naming which single variable your A/B comparison will isolate and what you expect the playtest to reveal about it.

Teaching team