cs150: Problem Set 9: Making A Dynamic Web Application

i> Presentation (optional): Wednesday, 29 April (send zip file before Noon)

or Report Due: Monday 4 May (Noon)

Peer Evaluations Due: with Project or Presentation Your site must be more interesting than just unchanging text pages — it must involve computation. Most sites will also involve a database (but it is not required if you think of a computationally interesting site that does not). Your site can be anything you want (so long as it is consistent with the University's policy on public computing resources). You may incorporate anything from previous problems sets you want into your site, as well as any other open source code you find (so long as your use of it is consistent with the provider's distribution license).

Your site should be as accessible to all web users. That means it should be obvious to any visitor what your site is for and how to use it. You site should be designed so it works well even for for visitors who have slow network connections (that is, its function should not depend on unnecessarily large images) or small monitors with poor color contrast. You should even strive to make your site accessible to the blind (that is, it should be possible to use your site using a text-only browser) or to users with iPhones or similar PDAs.

If you are having a hard time thinking of a good idea for your site, you may want to look over projects from previous classes:

Note that expectations are much higher for this year's class than in previous years: students in previous years did not do a previous assignment programming in Python, did not have the course book, and according to Neil De Grasse Tyson's essay we should expect this year's students to be 4% better, so your web site projects should be even more impressive.

Ideas

If you are having a hard time thinking of a good idea for your site, you may want to consider these titles from previous years:

Assassins
Bored in C'ville
Cavalier Daily News Discussion
Club Baseball — news, scores, schedules, stats, and rosters
Crossing Words — puzzle-generating website
Flash Card Builder for Pictoral Languages
Get Rich Casino
Hoo Knows Where To Live — easy-to-compare housing options
HoosGotIt — Your University Trading Service
HoosHookingUp?
Hoos Trading Books — student-run bookstore
Hoos Where? — alumni connection site
Marching Band
Meet a Hoo
Online Collaborative Scheduling System
Test Your Cognitive Abilities
The Adventure Nexus — interest and hobby networking site
University of Virginia's Pre-Medical Applicants
UVA Community Forum
Virginia Women's Chorus Forum
What Wahoos Watch

Another approach for finding ideas is to consider websites that you enjoy using. Could you make something similar to eBay, Flickr, Craigslist, Blogger, IMDb, or Facebook?

Team Requests

You will be assigned teams for this assignment, but I may honor team requests. You must send these by email. The subject line on your email should be "PS9 Request". If your team has agreed to work together, your team should send exactly one email, with cc:'s to all team members.

In order to increase the chances I honor your request, your email should not only list the team members but should give a brief description of the web site you have agreed as a group to build. Students who do not request teams, will be arbitrarily grouped into teams or three or four.

The size of your team may be between one and fifty students, but the impressiveness of the web site you intend to build should scale as the square root of the number of people on your team (e.g., a team of four students should build something twice as impressive as a team of one student working alone). If you have a large team, you will need to figure out carefully how to divide your project into smaller, independent pieces. The ideal team size in most cases will be three or four students. More than that, and you spend too much time on management issues. Less than that, and it is hard to build a sufficiently interesting web application.

Project Descriptions

By midnight, email to cs150-staff@cs.virginia.edu a document that describes:

The name of your team. You can keep your assigned name, or select a new one.
The dynamic web site you propose to build. It should make it clear what a visitor to your web site will be able to do. This should be at least two paragraphs long.
A plan for how you will build it. The plan should include all of these components:
1. What work will be done. Notably, this should include all programming: what key functions will be written? What will their input and output be?
2. How the work will be divided among your team members.
3. A schedule: who will do what when. Each team member should commit to a minimum of 20 hours outside of class each work to work on the project; stronger projects will require more time. Be sure to include support in your schedule for half-way milestones and slipped deadlines.
4. A testing strategy. It is important to have a strategy that will allow you to start testing pieces as you develop your site. Expecting different pieces of functionality written by different team members to magically work together at the last minute is a recipe for disaster.
You want to have ambitious goals for your site, but be able to get something working even if you don't accomplish them all. The plan should typically be at least half a page long, with each of the four points above meriting at least one paragraph.
A suggested grading contract. Complete this sentence: "We believe we will deserve an A on this project if we can demonstrate ..." We may not agree to your contract suggestion, but it will give us a chance to tell you if your expectations are very different from ours. The suggested clause should be more than "if we do all the work described above" — you must make it clear to me which course concepts will be involved in your project and where they will be involved. An A-grade project typically involves the strong use of at least two key course concepts and the weak use of at least one other. Projects should not just be PS8 but with new content (e.g., course reviews instead of restaurant reviews).
A list of questions you have. These questions should clearly identify anything you will need to do to build your site that you don't know how to do yet.
The team member sending the document must CC every other member of the team.
Your document should be in plain text format, HTML or PDF — but not DOC or DOCX.

Design Reviews

After class on Wednesday 15 April, each team will sign up for a time slot for a design review project meeting. All team members must attend the design review, so it is important that you select a time all members can attend.

At the design review, you will describe your ideas for what your site will do and how you will build it. You will also be expected to show your progress so far. We will discuss the questions on your Proposal document and how you are dividing the work among your team.

The design review does not need to be a formal presentation, but you should prepare for it to make it as useful as possible. In particular, you should come to the design review knowing what you think the toughest problem for your project will be and having some preliminary ideas how to solve it.

Presentations and Reports

The final project deliverable is either a presentation or a report (turned in by Noon on Monday, 4 May). In order to be eligible for the presentation option, your team must send me an email before 11:59pm on Monday, 27 April that contains the URL for your project site. Some essential functionality of your project must be working at that URL when you send the email to be eligible for the presentation.

In Structured Office Hours on Wednesday, 29 April, teams that qualify for the presentation option will have an opportunity to present and demonstrate their web sites. The time for each presentation will be alloted depending on the number of qualifying teams (but will probably be about five minutes per team). To be eligible to present your site, you must send me an email containing a zip file containing all the files for your site before Noon on Wednesday, 29 April. The subject of the email should be "PS9 Team N", where N is your team name. You should also send me usernames and logins for your site: I will have them available in another window for copy-and-paste when you give the presentation. You can change your site between when you send the email and when you do the presentation, but you should be very wary. Your presentation should include the following elements:

You should introduce your team and indicate everyone on it.
You should briefly describe the theme or purpose of your site.
You should demonstrate all of the key functionality of your site.
You should make explicit any major portions of your site that demonstrate key course concepts (e.g., "the whole site is a database-backed dynamic web site written in Python, but we also have this auction part over here ...").
You should make explicit any course concepts that you covered more minorly (e.g., testing, object-oriented class hierarchies, list filtering).
You should indicate the role of each team member. That is, you should explain who did what.
You should indicate what was difficult and what was easy.
Each team member must speak for at least thirty seconds. All team members must stand up at the front during the entire presentation. Beyond that, you can divide up the speaking and mouse-clicking duties any way you like.
Speakers should speak loudly and clearly while making eye contact with the audience.
You may do anything else you like (e.g., pass out fliers, call for audience participation) as long as you stay under the time limit. I will email the time limit once it has been determined.
I may ask your team a question or two at the end.

Further notes:

You will have a generic computer with a browser (e.g., Firefox) open to your website.
There may be some slop in the schedule. If your team would be interested in having extra time if extra time were to become available, please indicate that in your email.

Teams that do not do a presentation instead submit a final project report containing:

a short text description of your site
the URL for your project site
a URL to a zip file containing all the files in your project site

If you present your site, you do not need to turn in a paper project report.

Minor extra credit (+2 points on PS9) will be offered to students who attend the (optional) Structured Lab Hours on Presentation Day to see the presentations.

Reports

Unless you gave a presentation, your team should prepare a written report. It should contain the following sections:

Introduction. What is the theme or purpose of your website? Briefly, how does it work? Who would benefit from it? Why is it better than, or equal to, what is currently available? Sell me on your idea.
Use Cases. Walk through indicative usage patterns for your website. What do you expect a user to do? For each one, include screenshots showing all of the steps. You should include enough screenshots to show off all of your hard work. If you want to draw attention to a particular portion of the screenshot, mark up the screenshot (e.g., as the red circles in the PS8 screenshots). For most groups there will be at least two such use cases: one for each CS 150 concept. Notably, you should document everything a user could do on your site: if you don't document it, I won't know about it and won't give you credit for it.
Implementation and Concepts. Describe the computing, coding, or stylistic work that produced your final website. Which concepts and topics from the course have you incorporated into your website? Include code listings for non-trivial new code that you wrote. For example, you need not list changes to constants.py or other minor cosmetic changes. You should, however, list any new database interactions, or any code that shows course concepts (e.g., recursion, list filtering, auction logic, etc.). If your code sits in the middle of existing PS8 code, do not bother showing the PS8 code. If PS8 code sits in the middle of your code, gray it out or bold your code or somesuch. In any event, it should be clear what was your work and what was already there. Code you list should be documented. In addition, every piece of code you list must also be described in English in the report. If your code does not work perfectly, so state, and describe what should happen and how you would solve it.
Project Management. Describe your meeting frequency and structure. How was the work divided up? Who was responsible for what? How were the tests devised? Does your project pass all of your tests? How did you integrate separate pieces written by separate people? About how long did each person work on each task?
Conclusion. Are you pleased with the result? What worked well and what worked poorly? What was easy? What was harder than you thought? Did you stick to your initial schedule? If you were going to do it over again, what would you change? What advice would you give to people doing CS 150 projects in the future? Recalling your grading contract from your Project Description, what grade do you feel you deserve?

There is no length limit either way on your report. I am more concerned with the answers to the questions posed above than with filler text. Answer everything above fully and then stop. You will lose points for spelling or grammatical errors in your report.

Your report should be a turned in as a PDF file. You will lose points if you turn in a DOC or DOCX file.

Peer Evaluations

To prevent freeloading, part of your grade will be determined by peer evaluation. Peer evaluations can be completed via the automatic adjudicator, and must be completed at or before the time you turn in your report or make your presentation.

You must submit an evaluation of every member of your group, including yourself.

Group work can be tricky. For just one example of potential pitfalls, check out this recent journal article on gender biases in interpersonal communication. If your group has friction, please let me know and we can try to work things out.

Final Checklist: Presentation

If you applied for and received permission to do a Presentation, you must:

Give your presentation on Wednesday April 28th, as per the directions above
Complete a Peer Evaluation Survey for each member of your group (including yourself) by Wednesday April 28th.
Complete a PS9 Final Turn In by Wednesday April 28th.
You're done.

Final Checklist: Report

If you completed a Report, you must:

Email me the PDF of your report by Noon on Monday, April 4th.
Complete a Peer Evaluation Survey for each member of your group (including yourself) by Noon on Monday, April 4th.
Complete a PS9 Final Turn In by Noon on Monday, April 4th.
You're done.