Honors Project

For those of you who are in James Scholars of Campus Honor Program, you can do an honors project as part of CS 101.

Requirements

The project is open ended and designed to allow you to express your own interests and creativity. The requirements are:

• written in Python or MatLab, estimated length at least 100 lines,
• preferably an engineering focus, but it’s more important that you find the project interesting.

You can incorporate a program you have written previously or a program someone else has written as long as you can clearly delineate what you have added to the program. Your own code is what will count towards the size.

The line count is meant to give the expected scope of the difficulty. This can be shorter if you have to do significant amounts of research or modeling first.

Procedure

• Sign an Honors Credit Learning Agreement if needed.
• By Friday of Week 6 you need to email the professor with your project idea for approval. Describe clearly what your program will do.
  • Please schedule an appointment with the professor if you want to discuss your idea!
• Code it up!!
• At the beginning of Week 15 schedule an appointment with the professor to demo your project. The demo slots are about 30 minutes long, enough time for you to show how your program runs and to discuss your experiences with the professor. You have until the end of Finals Week to give your demo.
• Enjoy the shiny H that will appear next to your letter grade, and know that a professor will know you well enough to write a letter of recommendation for you later if you need one.

Previous Projects

Here are some ideas for projects; some of these have been done by students in previous semesters, some have been suggested by colleagues.

• Get a solarsystem dataset and calculate the transit times of verious objects.
• Use Python to control an arduino board to automate something.
• Simulate a chess board where the users can play a game and the computer can referee it.