Project 6: Final Project Proposals
Version 1.0. Last Updated: 2024-10-25.
We highly recommend reading through this spec in its entirety before you begin.
- Meeting with a Staff Member
- You must sign-up for a 10-minute slot with a staff member to get your project approved. Only one member of your group needs to attend. Failure to be one time will mean you will need to sign-up for a new time slot; otherwise, you will get a â0â score.
- Click here for the link to sign up
- Meetings will run a specific times during Week 11 (November 4th through November 11th)
- You must sign-up for a 10-minute slot with a staff member to get your project approved. Only one member of your group needs to attend. Failure to be one time will mean you will need to sign-up for a new time slot; otherwise, you will get a â0â score.
Content
VII. Proposal Review: What to Expect
Important logistics
- The Project Proposal Meeting is worth 10 points of your final grade. 10 minute Meetings will be held in person Mon-Fri during Week 11 in Soda 326. To schedule a booking, click here for the booking page: Proposal Meeting Sign-ups.
- You must work in groups of 2. Groups of 3 are sometimes permitted with approval from a TA, and we increase their project-complexity requirements accordingly. If you want to work alone you must get explicit permission from your lab TA. You will still be graded as if you were in a group of 2.
- The deadline for this proposal part of the project is Wednesday, 10/30 at 11:59pm PST. Please ensure that you submit your proposal before the deadline. There will be NO extensions available for the proposal and it is your responsibility to reach out on EdStem if your group can not make any of the meeting times.
- Please sign up for a time slot to meet up with a staff member for a proposal review before you submit the assignment on gradescope. You should sign up for an appointment on Google Calendar. You can choose whichever time works best for your group. Meetings will take place in-person, during designated lab times.
- If none of the times work for you, please make a private post on Ed ASAP. If you do not notify us by 10/30, you will not be able to meet with a staff member and will receive a 0 on this part of the project.
Introduction
For the final project, youâll be building a project that you envision in either Snap! or Python, completely from scratch (how cool is that!) First, however, youâll need to submit a project proposal that will be reviewed by a staff member to ensure that your project wonât be too easy or too complex. The proposal should come to about 1-2 pages, single-spaced (before you transfer the information to Gradescope). An example is provided below. This proposal is meant to be just an ideas-focused starting point â the spec for the technical requirements of the final project can be found here, and you should reference that as you work with a staff member to ensure that your project idea will meet all requirements.
Please read through this entire spec before writing your proposal. Keep in mind that the project proposal is a REQUIRED element of the final project, and you will receive a 0 on this part of the project if you do not submit your proposal and meet with a staff member for feedback.
Complexity Guidelines
Complexity, for your project, basically means âhow difficult is it to implement?â and is used as a measurement to ensure that final projects fit a happy medium of not too hard and not too simple, when taking into account both how much youâve learned and how much time you have. If your project idea relies heavily on the following, we recommend you consider alternate projects, or try a suggested workaround:
- Using any primitive block in Snap! Will not count as a feature
- Mainly being a guess-and-check game: This is generally considered too easy since it consists primarily of a - series of if-then-else statements. A number guessing game, for example, would not be complex enough. This might be a good mini-game in a bigger project.
- Data entry: Alone, this might be considered too simple. Often, projects that rely on data entry get âbiggerâ by having a bigger database. A fix for this would be having the data component be just one part of a bigger project.
- Robot/AI player: Depending on the game, this could be a good fit, or too complex. An AI player for chess or Go would be too complex.
- Games like Pong, Tic-Tac-Toe, Guess the word, or Hangman would likely not be complex enough and are NOT ALLOWED.
- Games like Angry Birds, Balloons Tower Defense, or Need for Speed would likely be too complex.
- Games previously implemented in Projects are not allowed (because youâve already done them).
Donât be worried if you really like a project idea but think it may be too complex, or not complex enough â thatâs the purpose of having a proposal and proposal review process, so you can work with a TA to get your project complexity into the right range!
When considering what your project is, and how you plan to implement it, see if you can figure out a solution or a structure for a solution first, before defaulting to what youâve seen done before! A few gauges for the complexity of the kinds of solutions weâre looking for are: coming up with logic to check for four-in-a-row in Connect 4 or recreating Flappy Bird in Snap!
Of course, thereâs a range of project complexity that falls into the âaccepted proposalâ range. Here are a few examples.
- The Chrome Dinosaur Game:
- Feature 1: TWO DIFFERENT OBSTACLES
- Randomly generated shrubs and pterodactyls appear on the screen as obstacles.
- Obstacles NEED to be traveling at different speeds (otherwise project will not be complex enough)
- Feature 2: The game ends when the dinosaur runs into an object.
- Feature 1: TWO DIFFERENT OBSTACLES
- Mancala:
- Feature 1: When a player chooses a group of marbles, those marbles get distributed around the board, picking up more marbles when the last one falls on a non-empty hole
- Feature 2: Game over when all marbles are in the two goals, winner is the one with more marbles
- Doodle Jump:
- Feature 1: Doodle jumps continuously, moving higher up in the sky as he lands on bouncing platforms that continuously move downwards
- Feature 2: Game ends when Doodle falls off the screen
- Bubble Shooter (Difficult):
- Feature 1: Computer will generate randomly colored bubbles that players can shoot
- Feature 2: If the program detects groups of the same color, it will delete them.
Other projects that fit complexity requirements that students have done in the past include: Frogger, Checkers, Flappy Bird, Snake, Chutes & Ladders, various puzzle games, various board games, data science analysis, Battleship, and chatbots.
Technical Requirements
There are certain technical and style requirements that we want you to be able to demonstrate in the implementation of your final project, regardless of what kind of project youâre doing, which are listed below. For some of the rubric items, you can also mix and match (see rubric for more details). Here is a list of some of the technical requirements you must include:
- Non-trivial list: Your project should include at least one non-trivial list, meaning a list whose function could not be simply replaced with another implementation. Often this can be a tracker of high scores, or part of a game board.
- Custom block/function: Your project should include at least TWO functions that you define yourself. There is no restriction on what type of function this should be, whatever suits your project is what you should do!
- Script/local variable: Your project should include at least one non-global variable.
Required Features
On top of the technical requirement your project must have required features. Here is a list of approved features. Your 2-3 features MUST be from the following list. If you are proposing to have a feature that does not fit within the guidelines below, you will need to discuss it with your TA, but it is unlikely to be approved. If you use two of the same features they must be distinct and have unique properties.
- 2D, Nested lists. The nested list can be a representation of the game board, highscores, positions, or some other structure
- Extensive, dynamic visual display
- Must include:
- At least one background
- At least two sprite costumes
- At least one sound
- A help screen or guide to interact with program / instructions
- Must include:
- Organized Text UI in Python
- Must include:
- A visual print statement of current state of program
- A list of functions the user can (such as help, place move, restart, etc.)
- Must include:
- Extensive use of OOP in Python
- The main logic of the name would use an OOP structure
- API calls (calls to other programs or websites) - Donât worry about doing this one; but itâs an option if youâre interested!
- Structures keeping track of important data
- Examples: Dictionaries, Lists, Trees, Sets
- Complex Algorithm
- Examples:
- Merge sort algorithm
- Determining whether a game is over condition
- Determining whether a move is valid
- Examples:
- Extensive use of libraries (in either Python or Snap!)
- Must use at least three different functions for the library imported
- Or three different libraries imported, and one function each is used.
- An AI that runs the program/plays game and tries to optimize for winning moves
- Features that DONâT COUNT:
- Randomization (itâs completely okay to have randomization, but it doesnât count as a feature)
- Helper functions
- Inputs/Outputs and Response/Prompt
- Example: Games that simply ask a user for a response/prompt to input
Proposal Contents
So now that youâve got a project idea in mind, itâs time to write about it! The questions you should answer in your project proposal are below. We recommend you draft your answers out on a Google Doc or Word document before submitting them into Gradescope.
- Who are the members of the group? List each group memberâs name and SID. You should work in pairs of 2, but if you want to work alone (or in groups of 3) youâll need to get explicit permission from your TA during the meeting. This is a complicated project, so we very rarely permit students to work solo.
- What language will your project be in? Python or Snap? If youâre doing a graphics-heavy project, we recommend Snap!, as staff will have limited capacity to assist with debugging Python libraries. If youâre not sure, pick whichever you and your group feels more comfortable coding in, and you can check in with your TA/tutor about it later.
- What is your vision for the project? Describe the specific project and the major 2-3 features (listed above) youâd like to accomplish. Groups of 2 should list 2 features, groups of 3 should list 3. Please go into detail on this one, even if you think your project is well-known! The clearer you are, the better your TA/tutor will be able to help you adjust the project if it falls outside the optimal range of complexity.
- How will someone interact with your project? Describe the controls that will be used. For Projects 1-2, the answer to this question would be text input via keyboard. For Project 3, the answer would be keyboard controls/arrow keys.
- What are the technical elements behind your features? Go into more detail about your preliminary thoughts about how youâll make the 2-3 features happen. What you come up with here doesnât have to be exactly what you end up doing, but it should convey how you plan on implementing the project in terms of blocks/functions or computing ideas. For example, Pytris utilizes object-oriented programming to build and abstract different elements of the game.
Here is an example proposal; it should give a sense of how much detail we want you to go into on the proposal. Feel free to make a copy.
Submission Guidelines
By Sunday, October 28th 11:59pm PST deadline, you and your partner(s) will submit your project proposal as a group on Gradescope. There is 1 assignment, and you should mention the date and time of the slot you signed up for in Question 2 of the assignment.
The assignment has the proposal format in it, so your group will need to fill out all of the boxes with your answers to the questions listed in the previous section! Only one person from the group needs to submit. After you submit, please donât forget to add your partner(s) to the submissions!
Your project proposal review will take place during the time slot your group signs up for. These slots are during the lab. You need to ensure that you can show up for the time slot you signed up for.
Proposal Review: What to Expect
You will explain your project and a staff member will review your project proposal, and either approve or disapprove it. Keep in mind that even if your initial proposal is disapproved, thatâs only an indication that that specific version of the project might have been too complex or not complex enough! Your TA/tutor will work with you during the proposal review session to figure out a fix or adjustment to your project idea or suggest other ideas if necessary.
Regardless of the status of your project proposal (whether itâs unfinished or youâve changed your mind), you must attend the project proposal review meeting with a TA/tutor. If you are able, please try to attend the lab/OH of the TA/tutor you have your proposal reviewed for the duration of the final project.
If your initial project proposal is not approved:
- Itâs okay! This happens to lots of students every semester, and really just means that youâll have to adapt your idea a bit to ensure it fits our complexity requirements, which the staff member you meet with for your proposal review will help you with. If you decide youâd rather pursue a different project idea, please note that youâll need to write up another project proposal, and have that approved before you can start working. Note: If you choose not to adjust your project as suggested or do not submit a second proposal when your idea changes, you are unlikely to receive full credit for complexity.
If your initial project proposal is approved:
- Congrats! You can start working on your project. Note any questions (for resources, clarifications, or suggestions/advice on implementation) that you might have for your project TA/tutor, and bring them up during your proposal review session!
As you begin to code, you may feel the need to make adjustments to your project and features (often because of time constraints or unexpected complexity). This is perfectly okay! You donât have to run the changes by your project TA/tutor to start implementing them, but we do recommend that you check in with any adjustments to ensure that you are still within complexity guidelines.