CS 16 (101) – Final Project – due 4:00pm Wednesday May 6, 2009

 

In this last assignment, you have the opportunity to do a project on a subject of your own choosing.  The subject of your project may be anything you are interested in, but subject to approval from the instructor.  To avoid having two groups doing a project on the same (popular) subject, I may ask you to take a different spin on the idea.  It would make sense for you to choose a subject related to your major field of study, or some topic you enjoy or are familiar with – though this is not required.

 

Your project will consist of 2 parts:

 

 

You may choose to work on this project alone or in a group of 2 or 3.  Groups of 3 are not encouraged unless you feel that your project really needs that many people:  to be fair, I will expect a little more work from a larger group.  Soon I will ask you to announce what your project will be about, and who will be working on it.

 

Here are examples of successful projects from the past:

 

  1. Database of area restaurants
  2. Statistics on the Dow Jones Industrials versus 30 Nasdaq stocks
  3. Market share of automobile makes in the US over each of the last 12 months
  4. Analysis of crash test ratings of cars
  5. Data and comparison of various endangered species
  6. Comparison of interest rates of various accounts offered by a sampling of banks, savings and loans, and credit unions
  7. Analysis of demographic and test score data of elementary schools
  8. Comparison of player stats in Major League Soccer
  9. Nutrition data for popular entrees at fast food restaurants
  10. Caffeine content of foods and drinks
  11. Comparison of the 50 brightest stars in the night sky
  12. Statistics on competitive law schools
  13. Tourist or surfing related data on beaches around the world

 

You may create your spreadsheet/database from scratch or download an existing one from the Web.  As far as quantity is concerned, you should create at least 300 cells of numerical data, but preferably much more than this.  The best projects may have thousands.  For example, if you are starting a spreadsheet from scratch, it should have at least 300 numerical or calculated values in it, preferably more.  And if you are downloading a pre-existing spreadsheet, the amount of new data that you compute should be at least 300 cells.  But quality and organization are more important than quantity, in general.  The extra functions that you add should reveal some relationships or trends among the data, hopefully to the point that a pivot table and charts would be useful.

 

When downloading data from the Web, you may notice that some data you want is organized into an HTML table rather than a spreadsheet.  Rather than retyping these numbers into Excel, there is a way for Excel to interpret the HTML table directly, as you saw in one of our early labs in Excel.  It’s called the Web Query, and you can access it by going to Excel’s Data menu and choosing Get External Data à  From Web.

 

Whether you are working on a team or not, everyone needs to have a personal Web site.  Your Web site may be the same Web site you created in the Dreamweaver labs.  For this project, you are to add at least one additional Web page to the site.  One page would begin with a brief summary of your work and major conclusions that you drew from the data.  If you have interesting images or charts, they can go on a separate page. It should have hyperlinks to your sources of information, and also a handful of related links.  For example, if you were doing the automobile market analysis, it would be appropriate to link to the home pages of the manufacturers.  If you are on a team, you may choose to have one person “host” the project Web page and have the other team members link to it; or you may copy the project Web pages onto each person’s individual account.  In either case, you need to have a link from your project’s Web page to each author’s home page.

 

Your spreadsheet/database and Web design should go beyond the ordinary and routine features.  Higher marks will be awarded for features that were not covered in the labs (for example: conditional sums, command buttons), or for more sophisticated designs.  For example, a link to Chevrolet.com that is a hotspot on a Chevy logo or a picture of a Camaro is better than just underlining the word Chevrolet.

 

When you are ready to submit your project, I need two things:

The spreadsheet or database file (send e-mail or copy to server’s In folder)

The Web pages that comprise your Website  (Or you could send me the URL.)

If you are working in a group, then only one person needs to submit these files.  One thing to keep in mind is that Furman’s Computer Center changes the Web publishing procedure from time to time.  One way to publish your Web site is to upload (click and drag) your individual HTML files to your “Home Page Folder” in your First Class e-mail account.  Alternatively, you can access your “G” drive, and create a new folder there called public_html which will contain index.html and all other pages/folders on your site.  If you are having technical problems with your network account, please call 294-3277.

 

 

Have fun with this project!  Please feel free to ask me any questions at any stage of the process.  I have set the deadline for this project as late as I can due to my constraints on when I must turn in grades.  Don’t forget to study for the final exam…  You will need to budget your time wisely.