Final Project Details

The final project for CIT 5940 is an open-ended group project to be completed in teams of three. Now that you have formed into groups, it’s time to pick a project!

You should choose a project idea that interests you and your group. The broad requirements are listed below. In order for a project to be approved, you must indicate how you plan to satisfy several important requirements. Please take a moment to review the general requirements and the grading scheme before finding the Project Proposal instructions below.

1. General Requirements & Restrictions

Team Structure

  • Teams will have 3 members
  • All members must contribute, verified by peer evaluations and GitHub history

Version Control

  • Teams must use GitHub project management tools (discussed after Spring Break)
  • Projects should be broken down into discrete tasks. These tasks will be managed & assigned using GitHub and tracked from planning through completion
  • Regular commits/pull requests from feature branches expected

Technical Requirements

  • All code must be written in Java (firm requirement)

Timeline

  • Groups formed by March 3 ✅
  • First proposal due: March 7
  • Feedback provided by: March 19
  • Required check-in meeting by: April 11
  • Second check-in meeting by: April 25 (Independent Projects Only)
  • Project code due: May 12
  • Project presentations to TAs: Until May 13 (can be scheduled after May 1 at group & TA discretion)

Documentation

  • All code must be documented with comments and tests
  • Fully featured JavaDocs included as optional “completeness” feature
  • Work with outside resources (books, websites, LLMs/Copilot) is permitted but must be cited

2. Evaluation Scheme

Core Features (35%)

This category includes the portion of your grade that comes from correctly implementing the core features of the project. Points for this category will be allocated differently for different projects.

Extended Features (5%)

This category includes the portion of your grade that comes from completing one or more of the optional features specified in the project descriptions. For independent projects, groups are responsible for proposing their own ideas for “stretch” features.

Design (10%)

This category measures two requirements:

  • successful implementation of two design patterns. For the Movie Name Game and Othello projects, one of the design patterns is specified for you.
  • system design that exhibits high cohesion and low coupling

GitHub (5%)

Use of Git & GitHub for:

  • version control purposes (frequent commits; pull requests to implement features; multiple students contributing)
  • project planning purposes (project tracking; enumerating features)

Testing (30%)

From this category, 25 out of the 30 percentage points are allocated for reaching 80% testing coverage. The remaining 5 percentage points are allocated for qualitative analysis of your tests: do you have many specific tests, or one large test? Are your tests meaningful, or do they just aim to execute as many lines of code as possible? Do you handle edge cases? Do you test both for inputs & outputs as well as state changes?

Documentation (5%)

Is your code commented? Do you have a UML diagram that correctly describes all of your class relationships?

Presentation (5%)

Do you have all of the required sections?

  • Project design
  • Initial project plans
  • Choices made for optional requirements
  • Project demo
  • Challenges faced/project retrospective
  • TA Q&A

Team Assessment (5%)

Points awarded for completing an anonymous Google form. All of the points for this category come from completion of the form, but I (Harry) reserve the right to adjust any group member’s overall score as a result of information that teams share about their members.

3. Project Proposal Instructions

The project proposal is a semi-formal “statement of intent” to complete either any one of the listed projects or an independently generated idea.

Each project proposal will need to include the following information:

  • Names of all group members, including designation of:
    • a Testing Lead who will be responsible for managing the development of a thorough test suite
    • a Design Lead who will be responsible for evaluating the design choices made throughout the project
    • a Team Lead who will be responsible for communicating with the instructor/project TAs
    • (Each member is responsible for contributing to all of these endeavors, but the leads will be the person who is responsible for managing them.)
  • The name of the project idea you want to pursue, including:
    • Which of the optional features you are most interested in exploring
    • Which design patterns you are currently intending to implement
  • Optionally, any questions or uncertainties that you have as you begin to work on the project.

Guided project proposals and Independent project proposals also require a few different responses specific to that choice. These are listed below.

Movie Name Game

Project Outline

  1. To implement this project, you’ll need to be able to look up movies by name. You’ll also need to be able to check quickly whether an actor appears in a given movie. What kind of lookup systems will you need to create to facilitate fast queries?
  2. You will be required to implement the MVC design pattern for this project. In this game, what constitutes the model? The view? The controller?
  3. This book, freely available from the O’Reilly Library after signing in with your Penn email, describes a number of different design patterns. Study a few of the non-basic ones and propose a way in which you might be able to apply one for this project.

Small Programming Language

Project Outline

  1. What is the purpose of a symbol table in an interpreter/compiler? What are some common ways that a symbol table is implemented?
  2. How does a Lexer differ from a Parser?
  3. This book, freely available from the O’Reilly Library after signing in with your Penn email, describes a number of different design patterns. Study a few of the non-basic ones and propose a way in which you might be able to apply one for this project.

Othello

Project Outline

  1. Summarize the key differences among Minimax, Expectimax, and MCTS. What is the difference between a backtracking search vs. a randomized search like MCTS?
  2. Provide a tentative class diagram that shows how you can apply the Strategy design pattern to this assignment.
  3. Do a little research on potential extensions for the provided algorithms. What kinds of extensions would you like to explore for your project?

Independently Proposed Project

  1. What is your idea? Why is it interesting to you?
  2. What are the core features that you are proposing? What data structures or class concepts will they make us of?
  3. What are some stretch features that might be interesting to implement? These would not be considered necessary for a “minimum viable product,” but would be somewhat complex extensions of the core idea.
  4. What do you anticipate will be the most challenging about your proposed idea?
  5. What guidance would you like in shaping your idea?
  6. Given that at most a few independent project ideas will be accepted, please select a backup idea from the three listed above. You don’t have to answer the questions for that idea yet, but you should be prepared to accept that idea after Spring Break if we do not accept your proposal.