Project 4: Final Project

Description

In this project, you will create a program of your own design, incorporating elements of data structures in your implementation.

Materials

Description

Unlike the other projects, you may work with one partner for the final project. You can also work individually if you wish.

You have wide latitude in choosing what to do for your final project. Your program can be anything you like, subject to the following requirements

  • You must incorporate a GUI built with JavaFX and SceneBuilder.
  • The GUI should have some persistent state that is modeled by classes of your own creation.
  • The classes should represent an abstraction of the underlying data representation.
  • Your model must incorporate numerous classes and enums in a sensible organization. Use the Maze or TicTacToe labs as a goal to strive for in your project.
  • You must incorporate a HashSet, HashMap, TreeSet, TreeMap, PriorityQueue, Stack, or ArrayDeque into your application in a useful and natural way.

Your project idea must be approved via email or conversation prior to the design submission. Get started early! Waiting until just before the deadline to start thinking about your final project will be too late.

Design

By Friday, April 24, you must turn in a design document describing your project and planning details of how you will implement it.

Your design must include:

  • An overview of your project and your motivation for choosing this topic and the way(s) in which your project creatively goes beyond what we have done in class and labs.
  • A description of the classes you will use to decompose the information in your project, with a list of the variables and methods in each class.
  • A discussion of the data structure you are incorporating, why you selected it, and why the asymptotic time complexity of its operations is a good match for your project requirements.
  • A sketch of the JavaFX GUI for your project.
  • A timeline of steps you will take to complete your project with deadlines for each step. Plan not just what you must do but the ordering of steps that will allow you to complete by the final deadline.

You should be as detailed as possible for full credit in your description. Time spent on the design will pay off immensely as you implement your project.

Feel free to use the Java 21 API as a reference for any piece of Java you might need.

Academic Integrity

As a reminder:

  • You may consult online resources (Java tutorials, StackOverflow questions, …), and you may even use snippets of code you find there, but you must clearly cite them in your project, by adding a comment with the URL of the resource you used along with a short explanation of how you used it.
  • You may discuss your project with other students in the class, but you may not look at another student’s code, or share your code with another student. If you need help debugging your code, see an instructor or a TA.

What to Hand In

Submit a zip file containing your whole project via Teams, and an evaluation document detailing how your application changed from your original submitted design, any unique and interesting features in your application, and any joys or struggles you encountered in creating your application.

Presentation

  • You will be presenting your final project to the rest of the students in the course.
  • The final exam period for this course is Friday, May 8th, 8:30-11:30am.
  • Your presentation should include the following 6 slides:
    • Title slide
      • Name of project
      • Name(s) of students creating the project
    • Project Goals
    • Degree of Achievement of Goals
    • Featured Data Structure
    • Unique/Interesting Features
    • Joys/Struggles encountered creating the application
  • After you present your slides, give a demonstration of your project. The demonstration should run from 30-60 seconds.
  • The presentation as a whole should last about 5 minutes.

Grading

To achieve Level 1 Complete, your project must

  • be structured based on a design document that includes an overview, a description, a sketch, and a timeline,
  • incorporate a GUI built with JavaFX and SceneBuilder,
  • incorporate at least two original classes or enums,
  • be free of syntactic errors preventing compilation,
  • include at least one GUI components with event handlers that visibly change the GUI,
  • the GUI has persistent state modeled by a pertinent class of the student’s creation, representing an abstraction of the underlying data representation.

To achieve Level 2 Complete, your project must

  • incorporate numerous classes and enums in a sensible organization, roughly at the level of the Maze or TicTacToe labs,
  • incorporate at least one HashSet, HashMap, TreeSet, TreeMap, PriorityQueue, Stack, or ArrayDeque in a useful and natural way,
  • work as intented (no bugs or missing elements)
  • be something that someone would conceivabley want to use,
  • exhibit some creativity and have some interesting features, and
  • include an evaluation document that:
    • adequately describes the project;
    • discusses how data is incorporated into and retrieved from its central data structure;
    • correctly states the asymptotic time complexity of each operation invoked on the central data structure;
    • discusses why, in light of the time complexity of those operations, the data structure is a good choice for the application.