Project Rules

• Produce a program that does something interesting in a visual way. No computing the digits of π!
• Use only the materials from the textbook and/or the labs. If you need tools that go beyond what is in the book, ask me for permission first. This is meant for thwarting plagiarism. There are lots of projects out there on the Internet (mostly using some other kinds of libraries or techniques), and I don't want you to grab one and tweak it.
• It is a team project. All of you contribute. All of you write some code. If you choose not to contribute, you will get an F for the project.
• Each of you has exactly one of the following four roles that you assign at the beginning of the project
  • The team lead manages meetings and ensures that everyone does their assigned tasks
  • The spokesperson prepares and gives the presentation
  • The report writer produces a report describing what your project does, how it is implemented, and how it relates to this course.
  • The buildmaster maintains the authoritative set of source files, runs tests, builds the program for the demo, and demoes it.
• Each source file is owned by one person who is responsible for implementing and documenting it. Use a javadoc @author tag to indicate the owner. Your group will not get credit for source files with no owners or multiple owners.
• Each of you submits a time sheet that shows exactly when you worked on the project. For each block of time, write the date, start time, end time, #hours worked (in increments of 0.25 hours = 15 minutes), and a brief task description. For example,

  2009-11-15 13:30 14:45 1.25h Team meeting; discussed
      design

  At the bottom of your time sheet, write the total number of hours worked for the entire project.

• By November 10, 5 p.m., your team lead emails me your project topic and the roles of your members.
• By November 29, your team lead emails me a zip file with the presentation, the report, the code, and the time sheets.
  Extended to November 30!
• Presentations will be November 30 and December 2.
  Presentations now all scheduled for December 2!

Project Ideas:

• Solitaire or memory game
• Other kinds of maze escape (with disconnected walls) or Pacman style
• A "simple" game: Tetris? Pong? Pentominoes? A dominoes game that checks the two players moves are legal?
• An animation (fish in an aquarium, cars backing up on the freeway, ...) which you create yourself.
• Visualization of data from the internet. For instance, Get some set of numbers (election results by district) and frequency distributions of the results. Or, get a large set of numbers which you would expect to be somewhat random, and analyze the first, second, third, last digits. They probably are not what you expect.)
• Draw fancy curves, like in P6.19, but more variety, like with a Spirograph.
• Visualize Monte Carlo integration. Draw curve that you know from Calculus, shoot random values into the enclosing rectangle and show the shots, then print estimated and actual area
• A visual simulation of some arbitrary "problem" in computer science, such as the Toilet Paper Problem, simulated with several different probabilities, or of caching hit rates for a small memory machine. (Consider two caches, of size 100 each. One has "First In First Out" to replace items, and the other just randomly replaces an item. Show the performance of the two caches as you run over nested loop, with x items accessed in the inner loop, and an outer loop which executes the inner loop 50 times. Graph the hit rates as x varies from 10 to 1000 for each cache type.)
• Some scenario with Alice 3 (but not Alice 2) that involves material from the second half of the course (arrays, interfaces, inheritance) One example: Simulate cars on a small system of roads, with traffic lights. Show traffic light synchronization can change how well traffic moves. Or show how one-way-streets can change total traffic flow. Or show how, when cars move on a highway, and there is an accident, the traffic jam propagates. Each can be done by simulation. For the last one, we assume that if a car is going much more quickly than the car in front of it, and gets close to the front car, it rapidly slows down to a speed even slower than the lead car's speed. Make up some values to see what happens.