EBoard 35: Project kickoff

Warning! You are being recorded (and transcribed).

Approximate overview

  • Administrative stuff
  • Questions
  • About the project
  • Identifying skills
  • Group formation
  • Work time

Administrative stuff

  • Good luck to any tennis players heading off to the tournament on Friday.
  • Apologies if today is a bit disjoint; the fire alarm interfered with class prep.

Token opportunities

Academic/Scholarly

  • Thursday, 2024-04-25, 11am, JRC 101. Scholars’ Convocation: Jonathan Rosa on Languages & Identities Beyond Borders.
  • Thursday, 2024-04-25, 4pm, Science 3821. CS Extras: Alex Hubers on the UIowa 4+1 (U2G) program.
  • Thursday, 2024-04-25, 4pm, HSSC N3118. “Beyond Grey Expectations: Seeing Chekhov in Color” by Anna Ivanov.
  • Thursday, 2024-04-25, 7pm, Science 3819. Mentor Session. Binary search and project help.
  • Tuesday, 2024-04-30, noon, some PDR. CS Table (topic TBD).
  • Tuesday, 2024-04-30, 7pm, Science 3819. Mentor Session.

Cultural

  • Most days, 2024-04-xx, 11am-6pm, Grinnell College Museum of Art. BAX 2024.
  • Thursday, 2024-04-25, 7pm, Grinnell College Museum of Art. Concert: Lifetimes of Water.
  • Friday, 2024-04-26, 4:00–5:00pm, HSSC N1170. Middle of Everywhere.

Peer

  • Wednesday, 2024-04-24, 11:30–1:00pm, JRC 101. Catalyst Fair & Celebration.
  • Wednesday, 2024-04-24, 7:30–8:30pm, Bucksbaum. Cornelia Di Gioia Presentation with GSO.
  • Saturday, 2024-04-27, 12:00–4:00pm, Kington Plaza. Spring Fest.
  • Saturday, 2024-04-27, 6:30–??:??, Harris. Cultural Evening.
  • Thursday, 2024-05-02, 6:00–??:??, Central Park. Peter and the Starcatchers. Really awesome.
  • Saturday, 2024-05-04, 2:00–??:??, Central Park. Peter and the Starcatchers. Wicked neat.
  • Saturday, 2024-05-05, 2:00–??:??, Central Park. Peter and the Starcatchers. Wicked awesome.

Wellness

Misc

  • Wednesday, 2024-04-24, 4:00–5:00pm, JCC Lower-Level Conference Room. Leveraging LinkedIn.
  • Friday, 2024-04-26, 8:30–11:00pm, Harris Concert Hall. Drag.
  • Saturday, 2024-04-27, 6:00–11:30pm, Gardner. Mary B. James.

Other good things (no tokens)

Upcoming work

Questions

Administrative

MP8

The autograder sizing test doesn’t seem to work for me.

Sam will try to remember to look at your code.

The test is pretty lenient.

When should we use sort?

First you would associate count of appearances with the size (hash)

Then you might change those to frequencies.

Then you should sort according to frequencies or counts.

Then you can use take (or a variant thereof) to get the top fifty.

What should our “smarter take” look like?

You could write it from scratch (which I’d prefer). Two base cases: The list is empty, n is zero.

You could write a conditional that looks at the length vs n and if it the length is < n, returns the list o/w calls take.

About the project

Group project (size 1–4). We’ll talk about group formation later.

Liberal arts project. Use your programming and image-making skills to help you better understand art.

Pick a starting image or set of images by Hilma Af Klint.

Write a procedure, (image-series n width height), that makes a width-by-height image. It should make a different image for each n between 0 and 999, inclusive. They should all be similar and related to the original.

Use at least two of the three key image-design techniques: shapes, positional computation, neighbor computation.

Use recursion at least twice.

See the instructions for more details.

We will have food for the presentation. Fresh fruit.

Questions and Clarifications

How do variants help us understand the initial image? It was written matter-of-factly, however I am still confused on how that is analysis.

Hypothetically, as you build variations, you’ll come to better understand the design choices the artist made. Do other other pairings of colors seem less compelling, too relaxing, …? In some sense, we’re generating something like the artist’s sketchbook for the piece.

Does working individually (stated at the beginning of the MP) mean that we can’t work with people outside of our group, or does that mean we can’t work directly with our team members?

Working individually means that you choose to form a team of one.

You can always talk to others.

I would like to see examples of the final images. Also how different should the images be? especially if we need 1000 of them, should the changes between one and another be super noticeable or can they be more discrete?

You can decide how different the images will be. They should be different enough that you’ll learn something from the differences.

How would you split up the work?

I’d suggest that you work as a team to decide upon the “big picture” of the project and how to decompose it. If you’ve decomposed well, you could have individuals or pairs work on each part.

However, I’ll note that the best teams seemed to work together most of the time.

Perhaps whether it would be beneficial to each person to work on their design after the group brainstorms the general idea or if all members should work on each image together.

I’d suggest working together on overall design.

How should the in-class presentation be different from the coding and documentation portion?

Your professor is the audience from the coding and documentation. Your classmates (and any visitors) are the audience for the presentation. In the presentation, make sure to demo your images and something cool about your code.

Should the time log be in a separate file or just somewhere with the rest of the code?

There’s a space in the code for the time log.

Could you provide some examples?

I’ll try to get an example ready by Friday.

How can we start to think about making 1000 variants of an image?

I’ll try to quickly talk through an example.

How can we work on the same Racket file from different computers at the same time?

That’s one reason we decompose.

You could learn to use GitHub.

You could sign up for a shared online coding platform. Repl.it is reasonable.

Mostly work together?

Know how you’re communicating and communicate clearly.

You might use a Teams channel.

Will you add curves to the CSC-151 library?

I can add almost anything that’s in the 2htdp library, it will just take time.

I’ll try to get curves working in some form by this Friday.

Can you help us make gradients?

Sure.

Project skills

TPS: What are some characteristics you’d like to be on the team

Expected of all group members

  • Kind and positive.
  • Timely and responsible.
  • Carry their share of the project. Be clear about what they can and cannot do.
  • Communicative. [+1]
  • Listening skills.

Individual skills

  • We’d like a “manager” to keep us on task and to arrange everything.
  • We’d like someone who can help us write useful recursive procedures. [+1]
  • We’d like someone who can design presentations (and maybe do most of the presentation)
  • We’d like someone who can Use Math for the mathy parts of the activity.
  • We’d like someone who “thinks differently”
  • We’d like someone with artistic skills or knowledge
  • We’d like someone who can document, test, and style code.
  • We’d like someone who knows the range of class material.
  • We’d like someone confident with the pixel operations.

Other issues

  • Similar work habits. (Sam says “too bad, so sad”)

Group formation

Please grab the cards that represent your skills.

  • White: Recursion
  • Red: Document/Test/Style
  • Yellow: Presentation Designer/lead
  • Green: Pixels
  • Blue: Manager

Try to form a group with all five cards (or at least four).

Work time

We’ll also have work time next Friday.

Things to do now.

  • Share contact information
  • Decide on meeting time
  • Come up with a team name THAT ALL MEMBERS AGREE UPON
    • Write it on a whiteboard.
    • Have Sam take your picture.
  • Come up with possible project ideas and sketches

We’ll hand out volumes and have you trade them every few minutes. You can also look online.