Hi, I'm Ulia Zaman

My contributions were centered on the case study: I recruited and interviewed student participants for the semi-structured interviews, and contributed to the analysis of interview transcripts to surface the study’s findings.

My contributions spanned both the research and design phases of the project. In the games review, I assembled the corpus of games analyzed, coordinated the review process across three authors, and drafted an adapted version of the Wilcox Ladder of Participation framework, called the Games Ladder, reorienting each level’s descriptions, objectives, and metrics toward how participation concepts apply specifically to games. In the gameathon, I contributed to the conceptualization of the overall Day & Sea game, its mini-games, and specific design mechanisms intended to support the game’s engagement and impact goals.

This was an undergraduate research project, designed and conducted in full as the sole researcher and author.

My contributions centered on environment setup and model evaluation. I designed the custom reward function and implemented the preprocessing pipeline that standardized inputs across both algorithms. I also wrote the evaluation code that loaded the pre-trained A3C model and benchmarked it against our A2C implementation on World 1-1, enabling a direct performance comparison between the two approaches.