APCS End-of-Year Project (COVID-19 Edition)
This project is not meant to be a review or summary. Rather, it is an opportunity to explore and create – to see if you can cause awesome things to happen using your coding skills. What you do is completely up to you. This is an individual or group (up to three people) project due on Monday, May 31. Presentations will begin Tuesday, June 1. As a minimum, you will be expected to demonstrate your final project (run it) and show the source code. It is recommended that you narrate your development process – relate major challenges or obstacles overcome, tell your story. There will be weekly Project Checkpoints starting Friday, May 7. At these checkpoints you will review progress against plan. As a minimum, your team and theme should be ready by Checkpoint 1. Challenge yourself, but manage the risk. Complexity, sophistication, and elegance are desired, but it’s FAR better to produce something simple that works vs. something more complex which does not. Do not make an unauthorized major topic change without checking with us first. Plan carefully. You are strongly, strongly advised to keep a version history– any time you make a major change to your source code, first make a copy of the unchanged version. Resources and programs: Google. Google. Google. A programmer’s best friend, arguably. You should not plagiarize large chunks of code, however. Stack Overflow. A good language-independent collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers. The Java API, of course. Look here to see what syntax to use and what methods are available. Github. File-sharing software which automatically synchronizes between computers – add or change a file on one computer and it’ll be changed on all. Preserves revision history. Dropbox. File-sharing software which automatically synchronizes between computers – add or change a file on one computer and it’ll be changed on all. Compared with Github, Dropbox doesn’t have quite as good a revision history and, as far as I know, doesn’t allow branching/forking. But, it does allow you to run the code and is easier to use. Netbeans IDE. Good for rudimentary graphics – it lets you drag and drop. Unfortunately, more complicated things are often an issue, the code may be long and messy, and without experience you may have little idea what’s going on. It can also be annoying, e.g. things may not look the way you intend. email. We (or your friends) might be able to offer you assistance. You should NOT have your friends write code for you, nor should you copy your friends’ code.
Checkpoints
- May 7 – Form team, define theme, layout project schedule and milestones. Can’t have too much overlap with other projects. Subsequent checkpoints will be every Friday:
- May 14 – decide Dropbox vs. Github, decide graphics vs. text-based, written concrete project idea, delegation of tasks, milestone schedule
- May 21 – progress vs. plan
- May 28 – Comments in code, sign up for presentation date if you haven’t already
- May 31 – project due
- June 1 - June 8 – presentations (June 9 last day of school) Food for Thought Check whether there exists any problem around you, or some unfulfilled need. Can you fix the problem or fill the need by writing code? If Yes, maybe that's the best project for you. Peer review Each member of a group will submit their own personal assessment of what their team members did. MOSS scan - Your code will be MOSSed for plagiariam. Grading Rubric Difficulty 25 Creativity 15 Peer review 10 Presentation 30 Total 100 Your project will be weighted 15% in calculating your overall semester grade.