Laboratory in Software Engineering
Spring 2002
Final Project Overview: Gizmoball

Handout F0

Quick links:

Documenting a Software System

Contents:

Overview
Requirements
Grading and Schedule

Overview

This handout describes one of the two final project choices you have this term, Gizmoball. For information on Antichess, the other project, refer to handout F1.

Your final project is to design, document, build, and test a program that plays Gizmoball. Gizmoball is a version of pinball, an arcade game in which the object is to keep a ball moving around in the game, without falling off the bottom of the playing area. The player controls a set of flippers that can bat at the ball as it falls.

The advantage of Gizmoball over a traditional pinball machine is that Gizmoball allows users to construct their own machine layout by placing gizmos (such as bumpers, flippers, and absorbers) on the playing field. These machine layouts may also form complicated "Rube Goldberg" contraptions that are intended to be watched rather than played. (If you don't know what a Rube Goldberg machine is, see http://www.anl.gov/OPA/rube/index.html or http://www.rube-goldberg.com/). As an optional extension (after you have designed, documented, implemented, and tested all required functionality), you may create new varieties of gizmos that can be placed on a playing field.

Any team which meets all of the requirements for Gizmoball will be permitted to enter the design contest. The contest is optional, and will not affect your grade in any way. Nominal prizes will be given to the winners.

Requirements

Because this project is in part a design exercise, the assignment specifies what the user should be able to do and leaves it up to you to figure out what modules and interfaces are appropriate. This section gives an overview of Gizmoball. A detailed specification will be handed out later this week. To enable automated testing, your implementation must support a standard file format (details will be provided), in addition to the loosely-specified graphical user interface.

Gizmoball has a graphical user interface with two modes, building and running. In building mode, a user can:

create and edit square, circular, and triangular bumpers on the playing surface,
create and edit flippers,
connect the action of flippers and bumpers to triggers, such as a keyboard key being hit or one of the bumpers being bumped, and
save and load the user's game configuration to and from a file.

In running mode, the user can play the game.

Grading and Schedule

You will work in teams of three or four. All members of a team will receive the same grade, except in unusual circumstances. Each team member should be responsible for part of the work including documentation, design, coding and testing.

Stage	Due date (subject to change)	% of project grade	Graded on
Preliminary design	Thu. 4/18	10%	Have you identified the issues?
Weekly meetings with TA	Mon. 4/08-Fri. 5/10	5%	Did all of the team members participate constructively?
Preliminary Release	Tue. 4/30	25%	Is it a good design? Is the required functionality present?
Design Critique	Mon. 5/13	25%	Are the tradeoffs & alternatives thoroughly analyzed?
Implementation & test	Mon. 5/13	35%	Does it work? Have you demonstrated that it works?

As you can see, 60% of your grade depends on design. Please realize that the most important aspect of any large software endeavor is design. A good, well documented design will make the rest of a group's work faster, easier and more enjoyable.

Notes

Another document will be released later this week to give a more complete description of what will be required by your team.
Please email your respective TAs with your team's final project preference, whether Gizmoball or Antichess, by the end of this week (April 6).

Back to the problem sets page.
For problems or questions regarding this page, contact: 6.170-webmaster@mit.edu.

$Id: overview.html,v 1.3 2002/04/03 18:04:25 kalpak Exp $