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Dennis Shelton

Mrs. Mansfield

ENC 1102

7 February 2021

Research Proposal

Situatedness of Genre

The activity theory for the genre of code starts with the community. To write a code,

there needs to be something to write a code for. A solution to a problem that is presented by the

coder themselves, or the group they want to answer the solution for. This group can be a teacher,

or a company. There cannot be a code without a purpose. The division of labor completely

depends on the group who can work on it, and how much work the solution needs. A normal

assignment for a computer science class may only require one person, but a lot of video game

and software development companies have dozens of coders looking over each other’s work or

working together completely. Common rules, especially when working with multiple people, is

to make sure your code has sufficient spacing to be easier to read, like the reason most essays

end up double spaced. The tools used for coding are relatively common and simple: a working

computer and a keyboard. Every coding language only requires you to have an ability to type and

read, and nothing else.

Prior Knowledge of Genre

I would like to research the coding, along with its comments. From what I know, I use

comments to describe specific parts of my code, so if I ever show anyone what it is, I can explain

it relatively easily through reference. I also use it the people who use this genre are anyone who

codes, since it’s important to communicate with anyone who’s making any adjustments to your
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code. With regular code, the only important thing is to write your code with the best, least

demanding and most importantly, efficient solution in mind. Generally, you want to space your

code it is easy to write as well. Depending on what application you use to code, your code may

have different colors representing different things, like variables.

Research Question

How does the genre of code differ based on the experience level of the coder? The

concept I am going for is how coders communicate through their code, which will focus

specifically on the comments, spacing, and the code itself, along with the output. I will use

activity theory and multiliteracies to investigate this question.

Justification

Research questions are important because they give a quick synopsis on what your topic

is, and clarity as to what you are going to be focused on. The more you must explain what you

are answering, the less you can talk about your answer. A lot of people who are thinking about

getting into code would benefit from learning about communication with code. When starting

out, a lot of people focus on getting the code working and moving on to the next challenge, but

do not think about how a lot of people going into the industry do not think about how they will

have to be working with other people, and other people will be looking through their code to fix

it, or at least understand it.

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Primary Research Methods

My biggest focus is going to be comparing amateur coding to professional ones and show

their similarities and differences. To do that, I need permission to get code that was written by

professionals. My solution to this is to use code that was leaked from Valve in 2018 for the game

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. This contains all of the source code for the game at that point

and includes a lot of code to go off of. I will choose the ones that include the best examples of

communicating. This will be coded in C Sharp (C#). I am not too worried about differences in

languages, as the focus of my essay is not on the differences in coding languages, and their

differences are not nearly notable enough to make an essay unwritable.

My comparisons will be using amateur codes from Freshman Computer Science majors

at UCF. These codes are written to answer a problem from a classroom assignment from the

class “Computer Science 1”. Their names will be removed from their code, and they will never

be mentioned personally.
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Access
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All the information I need is available online, and is quite easy to access:
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It can be found at https://github.com/TheAlePower/Counter-Strike-Global-Offensive.

Timeline

My timeline of due dates goes as follows:

1. Revise the Draft of the research proposal – February 9-10th

2. Take research questions from the proposal and gather the code most relevant to my

research question – February 11-15th

3. Read all the code and come to a thesis – February 16-18th

4. Continue to look through code and find if your thesis holds up – February 19-21st

5. Write the two-three main points behind your thesis – February 21-25th
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6. Write up the findings of the research – February 25th – March 4th