Final Project

Project Website, feedback addressed due: 4:00 pm, Tue 11 Dec
Demo Video due: 10:00 pm, Mon 10 Dec
Code Submission due: 5:30 pm, Tue 11 Dec

Overview

From now until the end of the semester you will be working with a team of students on a group software project. The project will culminate during the Final Event period for this class, with an EXPO style demo session.

Project Topic

Requirements

Suggestions for Project Topics

Teaming

Requirements

Team Formation Advice

Refer back to the answers you provided during the reflection and teaming surveys and share your thoughts with potential teammates.

Project Activities / Deliverables

Team Registration Survey

Due Thu, Oct 25

Add your team members and project idea to the ideation spreadsheet shared on Canvas.

Create your GitHub repository by accepting the GitHub classroom assignment and adding all team members to the repository. You will be using this repository to turn in all of the project deliverables listed below.

Project Proposal

Due Mon, Oct 29

The project proposal is worth 10% of the project grade (rubric).

Create a document on your team’s final project repo that answers the following questions. More detailed answers give us an ability to give you better feedback to start the project (or revise your proposal).

  1. The Big Idea: What is the main idea of your project? What topics will you explore and what will you generate? What is your minimum viable product? What is a stretch goal?
  2. Learning Goals: What are your individual learning goals for this project?
  3. Implementation Plan: This will probably be pretty vague initially. Perhaps at this early juncture you will have identified a library or a framework that you think will be useful for your project. If you don’t have any idea how you will implement your project, provide a rough plan for how you will determine this information.
  4. Project schedule: You have 6 weeks (roughly) to finish the project. Sketch out a rough schedule for completing the project. Depending on your project, you may be able to do this in great specificity or you may only be able to give a broad outline. Additionally, longer projects come with increased uncertainty, and this schedule will likely need to be refined along the way.
  5. Collaboration plan: How do you plan to collaborate with your teammates on this project? Will you split tasks up, complete them independently, and then integrate? Will you pair program the entire thing? Make sure to articulate your plan for successfully working together as a team. This might also include information about any software development methodologies you plan to use (e.g. agile development). Make sure to make clear why you are choosing this particular organizational structure.
  6. Risks: What do you view as the biggest risks to the success of this project? Since you’ve identified them, how will you mitigate them?
  7. Additional Course Content: What are some topics that we might cover in class that you think would be especially helpful for your project?

The teaching team will either approve your page, or provide suggestions and request revisions.

Architectural Review

Date: Monday, November 5

The Architectural review(s) is worth 15% of the project grade (rubric).

Each team will complete one (or more) architectural reviews, which will entail teams presenting plans for their project to other teams, NINJAs, and instructors. This review is intended to be interactive, and will focus on soliciting useful/actionable feedback rather than being a one-way brain dump. In addition to the in-person component of this activity, there will be a framing/agenda setting document due before the review and a reflection/synthesis document due after.

See the Architectural Review page for full details about the assignment.

Project Website

Due: 5:00 PM Friday, November 30.

Final revision, that incorporates instructor feedback, due 4:00 PM Tuesday, December 11.

The final website is worth 25% of the project grade

Your project website is the lasting record of what you have accomplished over the course of this project, and hopefully a valuable contribution to your professional portfolio. You should draw upon all the deliverables and activities above to create the final site, combining, reformatting, and adding to them to effectively tell the story of your project.

The project website can serve many audiences, including:

There are many successful formats for a project website, but you should consider including:

Note: These content prompts exist to inspire your thinking, and you should use whatever organization and sections make sense for your project and the story you’re telling. Simply answering the given prompts sequentially is not the strongest way to communicate your work to an external audience. Think about what you’ve accomplished and frame it nicely - finish strong!

Your final project website will be implemented using GitHub pages, possibly along with Jekyll (as we do for the course website). If you have a compelling reason you need to use a different platform, please discuss with course staff.

You must include a link to your project website from your GitHub repository.

Submission mechanics: Your project’s GitHub repo page should link to your web site. This means either the README, or the Website that is optionally displayed in the upper right corner of your GitHub repo page, should contain this link.

Demo Session Video

Completed and shared before 22:00 PM on Monday, December 10

The project video is worth 10% of the project grade.

Note: This deliverable originally also included a poster to accompany your final demo session. That requirement has been made optional.

Each team will create a short (1-2 minute) video giving a pitch for your project and demonstrating its functionality. Consider including the project’s goal, what the software does, how to use it, why your team made it, and what you would do if you had more time.

The teaching team will offer suggestions and give feedback on draft videos related to production quality and content.

Submission mechanics: Submit a link to your demo video on Canvas. Your demo video must be completed and shared in time to present at the final event. Your project README or project web site should also link to your video. Please do not host large binary files like your video in your GitHub repo; ask the teaching team if you need help with alternatives.

Code submission

Due: Tuesday, December 11

Project code is worth 40% of the project grade (see code rubric on the course policy page)

Project code must be submitted via GitHub by December 11. You must include a README describing how to run your code, including any required dependencies (e.g. libraries to install) and any input files (README rubric).

Proper documentation is important to your final submission, and one way to ensure you have adequate docstrings is to generate documentation from them. You can do this using pydoc:

$ pydoc path/to/my_project.py

This will open a help file based on your docstrings (use q to quit). Make sure the help file would be useful to someone using your code, and feel free to attach it to your code submission as an appendix. If you want to generate truly beautiful documentation, check out Sphinx (the tool used to generate the Python documentation).

Make sure that your code gives appropriate attribution to external resources used, as per the course policy page. If you have any questions about this, just ask.

Submission mechanics: Push your work to GitHub, and verify that all your final changes are reflected on github.com. Submit a link to your work on Canvas.

Final Demo / Presentation Session

Date: Tuesday, Dec 11, 17:30 PM

During the Final Event, SoftDes will meet for an EXPO style poster/demo session of your final projects. This session is for everyone to share what they’ve created, and will not be evaluated. We will be inviting other members of the Olin community to check out your fantastic work.