CS 110 –Introduction to Information Technology

Assignment 4 - PowerPoint

Due Date:  Thursday, Feb 28 5pm

The purpose of this assignment is to help you to gain some experience with working with PowerPoint and Excel. You will complete one of the worksheets, create a chart presenting your data, and use it in a PowerPoint presentation.

Please limit your presentation to 2-3 slides. One of your slides should contain an Excel chart (graph) with some representation of your data.  Another slide should present your recommendation based on the data you’ve processed.

You must fill out one of the sheets (Pujols or Mortgage) and use the data to create a graph.  Note that both worksheets are in the same workbook (Excel file). The graph should be imported into your PowerPoint. You can use any piece of data from the worksheet that you would like to back up your recommendation.

Baseball General Manager

The Pujols sheet shows Albert Pujols' stats for the past several years, plus the necessary stats for the next six years. You must calculate:

• Batting average – hits (H) per at bat (AB)
• On-base percentage(OBP) – hits and walks (BB)  per plate appearance.  Plate appearances include at-bats and walks (BB).  We can ignore hit-by-pitch (HBP) and safe at first (SF) since that's not given.
• Slugging percentage (SLG) – total bases produced from hits per at bat (1 base for single, 2 for double, etc).  This stat does not include walks.
• OPS – on-base plus slugging.  Just add OBP to SLG.

You, as a general manager of an MLB team, have the opportunity to add Albert Pujols to your club if you make the right offer. Your recommendation should use the data and Pujols’ current salary with the Cardinals to come up with a 4-6-year contract offer, or back up your decision not to make an offer. You may include other information in your recommendation slide (factual or not) or you could base the offer solely on Pujols' statistics.  Your presentation will be directed to the owner(s) of your team.  Be persuasive!

Homebuyer

Your clients are considering purchasing a home in the next several years, requiring a mortgage of about $275,000. Considering the prevailing rates and some estimate of the future rates, you must recommend an optimal time to buy (2008-2011), as well as a mortgage type.

This sheet uses the PMT function to determine the monthly payment amounts. Note that the annual interest rate is divided by 12, and the nper (number of periods) equals the total number of months for the loan.  You must calculate the monthly payments for each loan, and the total amount of the payments of all the payments over the life of the loan (in this case 30 years or 15 years).  Note the difference between this and your mortgage amount.  You may include other information in your recommendation (estimates of housing value trends) if you like, or you could base your decision solely on the interest rates.  There are many correct recommendations, depending on your reasoning. 

This spreadsheet can also be downloaded from the web at:

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs110/assignment4-s08.xls

Grading Criteria:

2 pts. – filling out the worksheet

3 pts. – chart

2 pts. – recommendation slide

3 pts. – design and creativity

Submission:

Please use the Instructional Toolkit at http://toolkit.itc.virginia.edu/ to submit the completed PowerPoint file and the Excel file. The files must be named

your_UVA_email id-hw4.ppt  and your_UVA_email id-hw4.xls.

Examples: mmc5y-hw4.ppt   and   mmc5y-hw4.xls

Honor Policy:

You are to work on this assignment individually. Please direct all questions to

cs110@cs.virginia.edu and/or attend office hours.