Final Project

Overview

Your final project for this course is either a game or visualization that shows off what you’ve learned over the entire semester. It will be scored against the course learning objectives, as with our other assignments.

Due Dates

Date	Milestone
10/6-10/13	Meetings with Pair Projects
10/17	Proposal Due
11/3	Rough Draft Due
11/10	Peer Feedback Due
11/18	Last due date for feedback on project
11/23 @ 5:30 PM	Final Draft & Reflection Due

At any point between these deadlines please feel free to come see me to get additional feedback on your final project, so long as it is before the final feedback date (11/18).

Guidelines

The final project is meant to be a culmination of all of the skills you have learned in this course, so that in the future you can quickly and easily demonstrate the skills you have mastered by presenting this project. Therefore, your project should contain all of the following:

L1: Basics: Your program should contain:
- Conditional statements and loops
- Functions you have written yourself
- Some data storage structure (lists, tuples, dictionaries)
L2: Data Processing: Your project should process either external files or user input, ideally both.
L3: Debugging: Your program should be free of errors, and should handle user-input errors gracefully (e.g. with a message).
L4: Style: Your program should be well-commented and use organized functions. You should have a README.md that describes what your project does and how a user can interact with it.
L5: Code Review: You will be asked to give peer feedback to your classmates’ projects; you should complete this peer feedback for credit.
L6: Collaboration: Your project should be uploaded to GitHub, where you should be able to see changes between the draft and final version.
L7: Reflection: You will be asked to submit a final reflection with your project.

If you hit all of these points, you’ll be given full mastery credit. 4-6 will be given Proficiency, and less than 4 will be given Novice.

Types of Projects

You have two choices for what kind of final project you’d like to create.

Option 1: Game

The first type of project is a computer game. Your game should incorporate some level of actual AI decision making. By this, I mean that the computer should play against you or manage your game in a moderately intelligent way. The computer doesn’t have to be that good at it, really! But you should make a concerted effort on this front, meaning that your AI will go above and beyond a simple random strategy.

Your game can include a true graphic interface, or it can be a terminal-based ASCII program, but should include some degree of feedback for the user.

Remember that your time is limited, so pick a game that you will be able to implement between now and the end of the term.

Option 2: Interactive Visualization

The second type of project is some type of interactive database or data visualization. By “interactive”, I really just mean that the user can choose what kind of data should be displayed. It is up to you how to display this data and what kind of data you want to visualize, with the caveat that your data should be from some publicly available source.

We do not cover visualization methods in great depth in this class, so you may have to do some outside work to find your preferred method of visualization. I’m happy to discuss some options with you!

Solo vs. Group Project

You may either complete your final project by yourself or with one other person. If you want to do a pair project, you need to schedule a meeting with me the week that your proposal is due.

If you choose to complete your project by yourself, simply follow the guidelines listed.

If you choose to complete your project with a partner, I will require that you use GitHub to track all changes so that there is a record of each partner’s contribution. Additionally, each of you should hit all the requirements outlined. That is, each of you will need to write code that deals with user input in some way; each of you will need to write a conditional statement and a loop; etc. This means a pair project will likely end up being slightly more complex than a solo project.

Proposal and Draft

I will require that you turn in a project proposal and a project draft. The proposal will only go to me; the draft will go to your peers.

Specifications: Proposal

The project proposal is a simple, ~100 word explanation of what you hope to accomplish for your final project. It should include, at a minimum:

What game or visualization you intend to make
What you hope the project will be able to do
What external modules, packages, or data you think you’ll need to complete this project (does not have to be exhaustive)
What uncertainties you have about the project

Below is an example:

For my project, I am going to create a “hot or cold” style game where people will have 10 chances to guess a US state. They will first put in a state name as a guess. Then if they are wrong the program will tell them if they are “Freezing”, “Cold”, “Warm”, or “Hot”. When they’re right the program will say “Congratulations!” and print out a picture of the state. For this project I don’t think I’ll need any external packages but I will need some pictures or ASCII templates of the states. I also need some way to tell how far their guess is from the state that is the right answer so I can figure out whether it’s hot or cold. I need some help figuring out how to measure that distance.

Specifications: Draft

The project draft should be as close to your final project as you can manage, as this is what will provide you with the best peer feedback. At minimum, it should run without error!

You will earn Mastery credit for just submitting the draft before the peer review period is up.

Specifications: Peer Review

You will be asked to review two of your classmates’ project drafts and give feedback on their design and implementation. A specific feedback rubric will be provided for you (and posted here) at that time.

For Proficiency credit, you must do the following for each project assigned to you.

Download your classmates’ code to your own computer and run it
- To show you have done this, paste in the output into a .txt file to resubmit with your reviews
Give some feedback on your classmates’ code using the following rubric.For each rating, give a short (1 sentence) justification.

Learning Objective	(N)ovice	(P)roficient	(M)astery	IC
L1: Basics	Project is missing at least one of: conditionals, loops, functions, data storage	Project has all of the basic structures, but may not be using them correctly (e.g. the `if` statements don’t do what they’re intended to)	Project is using each of the basic structural components well and efficiently	Not present
L2: Data Processing	Project tries to take user input or a file input, but does not work	Project takes either user input or file input in a basic way	Project concisely handles user input with input(“Message”) and/or uses Path for external files	Not present
L3: Debugging	Project handles user input with some basic checking but invalid input immediately ends the program	Project handles user input with if/else	Project handles user input with try/except	Project has obvious errors upon running
L4: Style	Project has good variable names, but no clear organization into functions and no comments	Project has some organization and some good variable names but could be improved with better commenting or putting routines into functions	Project has good comments and descriptive variable names	Project has no comments and is difficult to read due to poor naming/spacing

If one of these doesn’t fit the project you’re looking at exactly, make your best guess.

For Mastery credit, you should also write some additional substantive qualitative comments along with your ratings and justifications. Try to give at least one compliment and at least one suggestion for improvement.

To turn in your peer reviews, format your comments in a .txt file as in the following example:

SCORES
L1: N - i didn't see any functions being used but had loops and if/else statements used well 
L2: N - project takes one number as input from the user
L3: P - used try/except to check if there is an integer input
L4: N - no functions and variables are named like "a" "b" "c"

I thought you did a good job of handling possible bad inputs to your function by using try/except to check if something is an integer. One thing that might be an improvement on your project is sometimes you are using a dictionary to just iterate over values as the keys. You could probably use a list instead for this.

Reflection

Your final reflection is a reflection of both your project and the course. It is a short piece of writing that gives you room to reflect on your intro programming journey.

It is not scored, but you will get feedback and it will help me put your semester into context!

Specifications

1 to 2 pages, single spaced ( >= 500 words)
PDF or Markdown
Due with your final draft of the project

Prompts

You do not have to answer all or even any of the following questions; they’re just a guideline for what I’m hoping you get out of this reflective portion.

What was the process of completing a final project like? Is there anything you wish you’d done differently? Anything you’d add or change if you had another week to work on it? Anything you’d subtract?
How did the mastery-based grading style of the class impact how you approached the homeworks and labs? Or did not really impact you at all?
Was there a time in this class when something finally “clicked” for you after struggling with it for a while? What made it click?
What can you take forward from this class to other classes? This could be something concerete you learned, an approach that you tried, or something that didn’t work at all that you’ll consciously avoid next time.
Anything else you want to write about that will place your work into context for you and for me.

Github Repository

Your project will be turned in as a GitHub repository. Your project will be evaluated on the version of the project that is on GitHub at 5:30 PM Central on Tuesday, November 23, 2022. For legal reasons, I cannot accept work past this date and time.

If you want to turn in an earlier draft of the project to receive feedback, you can let me know at any time prior to 11:59 PM on 11/18. This is your last date to receive feedback from me on your project before its final evaluation.

Specifications

Your GitHub repository should:

Have a README.md which outlines the following:
- What your project does (the game, visualization, etc) in 1-2 sentences.
- What outside tools (modules, packages, datasets) were used to create your project
- What contributions you made to the project in 1-2 sentences
Have instructions for how to download and run your project, or instructions on how to run your project if web-hosted
Contain all the code necessary for someone to download and run your project on their own computer without going to any outside source (besides possibly installing python or python modules)
Ideas

This is where I would normally post a curated list of previous years’ projects. However, this is the first year this course is running, so… I can’t do that.

So here is instead a list of ideas:

Game Ideas

Visualization Ideas

Public health maps (e.g. COVID, cancer, environmental health)
University admissions and retention data, e.g. Sankey graphs
World population over history
Sports team win/loss records or other interesting sports data

Feel free to approach me with your own ideas as well. These are just to get your thinking started.

Portions of this document are taken from Dr. Anya Vostinar.