Extra Credit

Extra credit will be accepted up until March 15 (first day of final's week). From 1 to 5 points will be available toward the final grade, that is, after everything has been calculated and your quarter's grade is computed out of 100. Typically, the difference between a high B and a low A is less than a point, so 1 to 5 points can be significant toward your final grade. The quality of the project will determine how many points are given, but no serious effort will earn less than a single point. If you have ideas for other extra credit projects (e.g., see Projects Page), feel free to make me a proposal.

Potential Writing Projects

To submit a writing project, send me email before the due date with the name and URL of the page(s) that you created in CS2390 CoWeb.

• For each assignment that you get 90% or better on, enter it as a case in the CS2390 CoWeb. You can use STABLE cases as an example, or as an example of what to avoid. Use as many or as few pages as you'd like. Present the case so that it's useful to future students (e.g., easily accessible code, high-level analysis and design ideas understandable, etc.) Correct as many of your mistakes as possible -- and explain the corrections as useful process information for future students!

• Write an index of CS2390 CoWeb material. That means, write an essay in which you refer to content on CS2390 CoWeb and thus index it. Perhaps you might want to point out how some cases are similar or dissimilar. Maybe you want to write an explanation of MVC or of Sensors. Provide some new content that draws together existing content in a useful synthesis.

• Add keywords to existing CS2390 CoWeb material. Say that several of the cases deal with Sensors. Make up a new page on Sensors, then connect all the relevant cases to Sensors (Maybe put "Key Concept: *Sensor* at the top of each case).

• Write an active essay on some topic of interest. An active essay is a text that has embedded Squeak code to integrate computation (for demonstration, for visualization, etc.) into the topic. The term "active essay" was invented by Ted Kaehler, one of the fathers of Smalltalk. See more on his web page at http://www.webPage.com/~kaehler2/.

• Write an essay or case that has to do with the topics of the class, but may not be representative of CS2390 or anything currently in the CS2390 CoWeb. Take us into new areas! Music, sound recording, network programming, graphical layouts, an alternative to windows, new kinds of windows, whatever.

Potential Programming Projects

• Can't do this one anymore!. I did it already in Nu-UI.st: We're using a nice port of the Coad and Nicola UI package to Squeak: Squeak-UI.st. It's nice BUT, it uses DisplayTextView which doesn't scroll nor paint itself correctly. Maybe StringHolder is better to use here? Fix it.

• The current Squeak-UI.st also doesn't support lists -- the ModelCollectionViewContainer of Coad and Nicola. Build one.

• In my Squeak website (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/mark.guzdial/squeak/), I have a real-time chat tool that works, but not well. It has two serious flaws. First, it's based on the WebTalk toolkit which is no longer being supported by its author. Second, it uses DisplayTextView which don't scroll and paint onto the display in Squeak -- but that's because it uses Squeak-UI.st. Create a new, working chat tool for Squeak.

• At the UIUC Smalltalk Archive (see the O-O Links in the CS2390 CoWeb), there is a Regular Expression generator for Smalltalk that will not work as-is for Squeak because it uses local variables in its blocks. Make it work for Squeak.

• I'd love to get an outliner in Squeak! Stephen Pope has the start of one at the CREATE Site website.

• I want a reusable tool that takes two ordered collections of values and returns a Form of a line graph of the two sets of values. Labels, axis controls, etc. would be nice, but the basic graph is the main thing.

• Georg Gollman has written NNTP and SMTP client cores for Squeak (http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/~go/Squeak/NewsAgent.st). Wrap a simple MVC browser-like UI on it and poof! you have a cross-platform Eudora!

• Create an MVC-based sound recording tool for Windows and Macs.

• Squeak has sockets, sound recording (on Macs and Windows), and sound playback. Sounds like the basics are there for an Internet-based phone, or at least, telecom or walkie-talkie.