Assignments
[Note: this webpage last modified Thursday, 08-Dec-2011 22:45:02 EST]
Homework assignments will be posted to this website. Homework assignments are due by 11am one week after handed out (so you have one week to complete them). If you turn in the assignment late, I will grade it so you know how you did, but it will count as a 0.
You should email your homework solution to me at jkinne@cs.indstate.edu before it is due.
For each assignment, please download the template file by right-clicking on the the link, and choosing "Save target as" or "Save link as" (or whatever your browser calls it). You should put your answers into this file, and then turn in this file as an attachment to an email. If you do not turn in your homework in this way, I will take off points!
hw11.py due before 3pm December 15. You should do it before the exam since it will be good practice. It is set to be due by Dec 15 because that is the later of the two exams. As mentioned in class, the grade formula will be come "drop lowest 2" instead of "drop lowest 1". Regardless, you will be better off to do this homework.
Project grade 0: Email your project code to Jeff before class on December 6th. It will be graded as a "project checkin". You should have made progress since we last looked at the project. You should follow the guidelines below in terms of comments, etc.
Project presentation: In class on either December 6th or during the exam slot (we'll put a schedule up in week or two), you will give a short (5 minute) presentation of your project. This will include giving a demonstration of what the project does and explaining some parts of the code. I will post more detailed instructions later. The presentation will be graded and will count as part of your project grade.
Expectations for the presentation: Each group will have approximately 5 minutes. You should first describe your project in a few sentences and give a demonstration. You can hook up your own computer to the projector or use the one that is there. After giving the demonstration, you should go through some parts of the code. In particular if you are using anything (e.g., pygame) that we have not seen in class, you should explain how it works. You can expect questions from Jeff as you present. Your fellow classmates are also encouraged to ask questions if something comes to their mind.
For the presentation grade, you will be graded on the quality of your presenting only, not on the quality of your program. So, remember to speak loudly and clearly, and explain in a way that is easy for your classmates to understand. Your intended audience for the presentation is your classmates, not Jeff (i.e., you cannot assume the audience has already seen your project, and assume your classmates' speed of understanding, not Jeff's).
Final project due: The completed project will be due before December 18. Email it to Jeff before the end of that day. Follow the guidelines below.
Exam 2: We will have a final exam during the exam period allocated to this class. It will cover everything from the semester. But it will not cover images, turtles, or tkinter. You can attend the exam slot for either section of the course (the tests will be different).
Project
We have discussed instructions for the project in class. Here are a few things to remember.
- You can do anything you want for the program, but it must be "complicated enough". Another way to phrase that is that it must use enough of the concepts we have learned. Your program should (eventually) use loops somewhere, use multiple functions, and use lists or dictionaries.
- YOU MUST CITE ANY SOURCES YOU USE. Copying code from somewhere and not citing it as a source is plagiarism, as has been discussed before in relation to homeworks.
- The project turnins are graded according to the information under "Grading Programs" in the syllabus. Go look at that now.
- You should have comments at the top of your file describing what the file is and what your project does. Here are items that should be included: authors of the code (you and your partners), what the program is supposed to do, how to run the program (e.g., load the file and then run xyz function), what the status is (what is working, what is not, etc.), and what you are still trying to get working.
- You should have enough comments throughout the file to make it easy to understand and read. You should view writing a program as having components that are similar to writing a paper in one of your humanities classes. It should be logically laid out and easy to follow. In general, if you should probably have a comment line at least every 10 lines of code (though this varies - I normally would have a comment line at least every 5 lines of code).
- You should use functions! In general, you should not have a single bit function with 100-ish lines of code. Each function should do something that makes sense (e.g., get the user's name and information, update where the turtle is on the screen based on xyz, ...). Normally, if you put things into separate functions that belong in separate functions, each function will be less than 50 lines of code. Having your code separated out into functions (in a way that makes sense) also makes it easier to read your code!
- Your code better run! If you send me code that has an error and does not even run, you can expect a VERY low grade.
Assignment ideas
(So I remember, some things we might have HW assignments over, also project ideas...)
- Nifty Assignments
- Something that would be useful for someone: learning games for kids, something to do with disabled or impaired (e.g., voice commands, or a reader), math teacher.
- Interpretor for simple programming language or assembly/machine language.
- Encryption/decryption.
- Planetary simulator.
- Fractal drawer.
- Financial calculator (interest, mortgage, ...).
- Arithmetic game, typing game.
- Plotting a graph, solving equations.
- Painting application.
- Dealing with sounds (clipping, splicing, echoes, volume, ...).
- Dealing with videos (animation, splicing, etc.).
- Compression.
- Pygame.
- Networking, urls.
- Picture toolkit. Here are some additional picture effects you could
"easily" do using similar functions that we used in class. The function
to start with is the grayScale function. It goes through each pixel in
the image and makes the pixel gray.
- Change the range of the x and y that are changed - rather than the whole image, just some part of it. This will be some rectangle in the image. You could also include an extra if to just select a circle, corner, or other shape.
- Make the picture black and white. That would be setting the pixel to all 255 or all 0 depending on the average of the red+green+blue there was before.
- Similar to doing black and white, you could also make a picture sepia toned.
- Red eye removal. By looking at just a rectangle around the eyes in a picture, you could select the pixels with the right "red" color by using an if, and change those to black.
- Other changes like red eye. You could select out other colors to change in an image for interesting effects - change someone's skin color to be green, change the green on trees and grass to be purple, etc.
- Fading. For making many of the changes, you could make them gradual. For example, make an image that gradually changes from normal color on the left to grayscale on the right.
- Just about anything that is in normal picture editing programs, you might be able to do. You can also incorporate some of the turtle stuff and some of the image stuff together.