2016 November 4,

CS 111: Project

Introduction

Most of the rest of this course will be occupied by the final project. It must be handed in electronically by Monday 2016 November 21 at 5:00PM. You may develop your project on your own computer, but it must function correctly on our lab machines, where it will be graded.

You have over two weeks to work on the project, and the size of the project should reflect that amount of time and effort. You are strongly encouraged to work on the project with one (and only one) partner, because two workers can produce a more interesting product than one worker. If you would like help in finding a partner, then e-mail me.

The goal of the project is for you to write a program of significant size and complexity in an object-oriented style. Your project must involve at least two classes of your own creation. At least one of your classes must be a subclass of another one of your classes, to demonstrate that you understand subclassing.

Ideas

The kind of program is up to you, but here are a few suggestions. First, you can certainly use PyGame to make a game:

• You could write user interface, creator, and solver for sudoku puzzles. Your solver could be iterative or recursive. How big of a solution set would you have to search? Could you search the whole set? Or would you need to use heuristics to seek out the most likely solutions?
• You could write a user interface and artificial intelligence for checkers, Reversi, etc.
• In an earlier term, one of my students wrote a Rogue-like game, focusing on the problems of randomly generating and laying out the dungeon.

But maybe you don't care for games, or you know already that designing a well-balanced game is more difficult than it seems. There are other things you can do with graphics and sound:

• Our earth-moon-zombie simulations could be adapted into a simulation of any set of entities interacting according to their position, velocity, and other individual properties. In a previous term, one pair of students created an educational simulation in which nucleotides and amino acids performed the transcription of DNA into RNA and then the translation of RNA into a protein. Similarly, you could study and implement cellular automata.
• How about making your own musical instrument? Use PyGame to make a user interface hooked to some sounds. Things get really interesting if the program has its own internal logic for how sounds combine...
• Do you enjoy fractals? Maybe you should make a program that lets the user draw and interact with great fractals such as the Mandelbrot.
• Want to know more about the ideas of computer graphics? You can write your own 3D graphics system from scratch. All you need is a little linear algebra and the ability to draw a triangle (which PyGame can do for you). Ask me how.

Do you have to make a program about graphics and sound? No, if you have a better idea.

• Python can fetch information off the World Wide Web using the urllib module. You could write a program that crawls the web, or that fetches information from Facebook and manipulates it somehow. This kind of project requires some care; not all sites like being crawled by robots.
• Many modern programs, such as Apple's iTunes, store files in a format called XML. Python comes with an xml module for processing XML files. You could use this library to manipulate iTunes libraries, for example.

The prefect and I will talk with you occasionally, to see how your ideas are evolving and how your project is progressing. I have one last request: Do not make a project about zombies.

Polishing and Submitting your Work

You and your partner will submit a single copy of your project. In your hand-in folder on the COURSES file server, make a new folder called "project". You will place your program files, image files, sound files, and any other supporting files in this folder.

Among the files that you submit, there must be a file called "readme.txt" or "readme.pdf". (It should be a plain text file, of the sort made by TextWrangler or a text editor, or a PDF file. Do not submit documents of any proprietary format, such as Microsoft Word.) I will read this readme file, just before grading your project. Hence the readme file is your chance to "frame" your project, so that I come away satisfied and impressed. The readme file should probably explain:

• the names of both partners
• the point of your project, succinctly
• the class hierarchy of your code, including the purpose of each class
• how to use your program, including all major features
• which features do not work, if any
• which aspects of your project were most challenging
• what you would add, if you had more time to work on the project

Your project will be graded based on its fulfilment of the basic requirements (e.g. at least one subclass), its technical competence (does it work?), its technical difficulty (was it hard?), its polish (clean, efficient code), its documentation (comments and readme), and its creativity.