For Phase I of the project, turn in a proposal of what you will be doing for your project. If you are just going to modify the "draw" program, a sentence saying that is enough. If you are going to do something different, write a very short paragraph describing your project (the hard part is getting the right level of difficulty -- not too easy or too ambitious). Be sure to include your name(s).

NOTE:You can email your proposal to the TA (and you can submit it early!).

I am not going to require a complete design, but I have listed below the design steps that I have required for similar projects in the past. You should read these over (and maybe actually do some of them) before implementing your project.

In the past, most people have added features to the draw program, as suggested in the Project Implementation page. However, others have done different projects, such as the ones listed below:

Possible alternative projects:

• One student in a past offering of the course built an interactive graph editor -- you could place vertices in the drawing area and specify edges between them; and remove edges and vertices.
• Design a 1- or 2-person game or puzzle. Some possible examples of games would be checkers, ordinary or 3D or n-Dimensional tic-tac-toe, Othello (Reversi), battleship, etc.
• Add a graphical user interface to an existing program that doesn't have one, such as a program you wrote for another course.
• Enhance the draw program to draw repeating patterns.

You may work in groups of 1, 2 (if you have 2 people in your group, I expect your project to be larger/more refined); there will be just one report per group.

Turn in: (2 points) a description of your project - don't forget your name(s).

NOTE:You do not have to go through the following "Design Steps" (as you would for a real interactive program), but please read through them.

Design Steps

1. Define the problem
           As mentioned, this part is often the most difficult. The main idea is to provide a program that allows the user to define and edit a scene of simple graphical objects -- e.g.: for the purpose of designing advertising, designing a logic gate circuit, a polygon "editor", a graph (nodes, edges) editor, or designing a system/organization flowchart, or ?? (you or your group can decide the emphasis).
2. Model the operator
           You may assume that the operator is like you: computer literate, but not so familiar with the domain concepts (this will depend on which project you choose).
3. Perform task analysis
           The main task in the draw program will be editing: adding objects is easy, deleting them is hard (erasing is somewhat easier), draw will maintain a database of objects -- so reading in a previously created drawing (database description) and saving a drawing to a file will be other tasks (already done for the original version of the program).
4. Defining Computer objects and functions that correspond to the task domain
          
   • make correspondence between task objects and computer objects (the drawing corresponds to the data structure representing it; an add_rectangle procedure corresponds to the task of adding a rectangle), and divide computer objects into semantic & syntactic categories
   • provide general computer services (decide which ones, if any that you will provide -- justify not providing the ones listed in the text if you don't provide them -- e.g. too hard, or not appropriate to this application)
   • decide who drives the interaction
5. Designing the user interface
           Address the following issues:
   
   1. choose interaction objects (pushbuttons, menus, etc.)
   2. decide on how to make the system state explicit to the user
6. Evaluate the design
           This should go on concurrently with the first 5 steps.