CE 311K    Instructions for Turning in Term Projects

 

As we’ve discussed, the deadline for completing your term projects is 5PM on Friday May 3.   At that time, I expect that you have completed your term project and its description in html and linked everything so that it can be seen from your website by an external viewer (that is, somebody not in the LRC).    There is no requirement to turn in anything on paper.

 

The list of term projects available can be seen at:

http://www.ce.utexas.edu/prof/maidment/ce311k/docs/termproj.htm

 

If your project is posted now, I have linked to the project file.  If it is not yet posted, I have linked to your home page, so that when your project is posted there, I will be able to go to it.

 

Your term paper in html should include:

 

  1. A table of contents with links to the sections in the interior of the paper
  2. A link to a Winzip file or a .xls file that contains your program’s executable code
  3. Definition of the engineering problem that your computer program solves
  4. Specification of the input data required, and how it can be obtained
  5. A set of instructions on how to operate your program, with screen shots of the graphical user interface.
  6. A text listing of your program source code
  7. An example of the results of your program’s operation
  8. An assessment of how effective you think your program is.   What could be done to extend or improve your program?

 

 Some suggestions after viewing some of the completed projects and programs:

 

1.     Be careful that your user interface is not too large.    The computers in the LRC have large screens and high pixel resolution.  If you use all of that, likely portions of the right side and the bottom of your user interface will not be viewable in a computer with a smaller screen and less pixel resolution.

2.     Make sure that your project report file has an absolute web page address, such as the one give above for the term project list.   If you just make a link in Word to a document in your Z drive, it may be that all that is stored is the related address on the Z drive, which means that only you can see it, and then only when you are working in the LRC.

3.     Make your submitted project description a .htm or .html file.   You can do this in Word by saving the file using Save As/ Web Page.   This will create the text htm file and an attached folder of images from your Word doc.   The advantage of having the file saved as web page is that the text automatically adjusts itself to whatever width of screen the web page viewer provides.   If you display the report as a Word .doc file, the format is fixed and may run over the right hand side of computers with small screens.   It’s a lot easier to create web pages in Word and save as Web Page than trying to do the html as a text file.

4.     If your project is done in VBA for Excel, attach the .xls file from Excel to your project report html file.    If your project is done in Visual Basic, you must make both the .vbp and .frm files available if the project is to be executed in design mode by somebody else.   You should also convert the project to an executable by using File/Make ….exe.     Executable files cannot be downloaded from a website directly, so the best way to make them available is to put them inside a Winzip archive, as I demonstrated in class on Tuesday.   This makes a .zip file that you can attach to your web page and that I can download.

 

I am going to ask Hiroshi to make a preliminary pass through all the projects to make sure that they are displayed correctly after 5PM on Friday.

 

The term project is worth 20% of the final grade.    When I grade the project, I will be looking for:

 

 

Good luck!!   It’s been fun seeing these projects grow and evolve this semester into some really neat finished results.