Friday’s Class, Problem Set 8 Options

I don’t plan to go into any more depth on the interpreter in Friday’s class, but if there are any aspects of it that are unclear at this point, please let me know and I will cover them on Friday. Otherwise, you should have a clear understanding now of everything in the interpreter, and feel confident that you will be able to modify it as needed for Problem Set 7.

There are three options for Problem Set 8:

• Plan J: Learn to program in Java, extend a Java implementation of an interpreter for a Charme-like language to support static type checking. This is the option that must be selected for students who take cs2110 in the Spring. Everyone is welcome to do this option, but if you indicated any interest in BA Computer Science as a first or second major on your course registration survey (Problem Set 0), you are expected to select and complete this option. If you indicated interest in the CS major but prefer to do a different option, you must send me a good explanation of why you prefer the other option.
• Plan C: Conveying Computing. For this option, you will create an artifact that explains something relevant to computer science to a target audience. You can define your target audience but should specify what it is. Examples of target audiences include “typical third graders”, “your parents”, “UVa students majoring in history”, “Martians”, “introductory cs students”. Your artifact can be anything you want that can be posted on the Internet. Examples of possible artifacts include improving a Wikipedia page, a story, a comic, a video, a song (with lyrics), or an interpretive dance. If your artifact cannot be posted on the Internet (for example, if you bake a cake, build a quantum computer, or develop a time machine) you should still post a description of your artifact (including a picture if helpful). For some inspiration on this, you may want to look at what students in the cs3102: Theory of Computation course did for a similar assignment: Conveying Complexity Highlights.
• Plan W: build a dynamic web application or Android application. We won’t be able to provide much help with this, but if you want to do this you may find it helpful to look at assignments from previous cs1120 courses where this was the only option for Problem Set 8: HoosHungry.com?, Make a Dynamic Web Application.

For all of the options you make work alone. For Plan J, you may collaborate with other students, but everyone will need to write and turn in their own code to ensure you are all well prepared to take cs2110. For the other options, you may partner with as many students as you want, but the impressiveness of your artifact or application should scale at least as (sqrt N) of the number of students in your team (i.e., if your team has 4 students, you would be expected to do something at least twice as impressive as what a single-student team could do).

You need to declare which plan you are doing by submitting the PS8 Commitment Form by 5:00pm on Monday, 14 November.