The CPS 1 Project

Think of this as a term paper, presented on a web page. This project is worth 17% of your grade. There are several, important, due dates:

Project proposal due Friday November 7
Project outline due Friday November 14
Project checkpoint due Monday November 24
Project (complete) "early" due Monday December 1 (extra credit)
Project (complete) "regular" due Wednesday December 3
Project (complete) "late" due Friday December 5 (penalty)

The following is intended to describe the project and to get you started. There will be additional info on the web at later dates.

Groups

You are strongly encouraged (though not required) to do your project with a partner. You may have at most one partner. The students in a group do not need to be in the same lab section, and both partners will receive the same grade.

On occasion, we have a few "delinquent" students who do nothing and rely on their hard-working partner to do the project for them. We have three bits of advice on that matter. First, plan on doing your share of the work and make sure you are available in the time before the project is due. Second, make sure you have a partner you can trust. Thirdly, if you find your partner is delinquent see Prof. Ramm as soon as possible. He will usually give a warning and then if problems persist, he can grant divorce requests. The delinquent partner typically receives a zero for the project.

Every semester groups claim that the computer somehow ate their files. You are responsible for making sure your project is in working order, so save early and don't leave anything to the last minute.

Turning in unacknowledged writing not written by members of your group or supplied by the course staff constitutes cheating and will be dealt with as an Honor Code (Community Standard) Violation.

Project Proposal

You and your partner, if you have one, must then submit your name(s), login(s), lab section(s), project topic, and a brief proposed summary (one paragraph) of your essay by the end of the day, Friday, November 7. To submit your project proposal, create a text file called proposal.txt and use the submit program with the assignment specified as projproposal.

~dr/bin/submit_cps001 projproposal proposal.txt

If working in a group, please submit only ONE project proposal and be sure to include the names of both group members.

Essay Topics

For each of these topics/questions, your project should state some opinion and provide supporting arguments. Your essay must have some sort of discernible thesis statement where you take a stand on some issue. Example of a thesis statement: "Computer science is a pointless enterprise that has no place in university." An example of a bad thesis statement: "Computer science involves the study of computation." The first example takes a position that can then be backed up by more writing, while the latter one just states what is more or less a fact.

Your grade will be based upon the following aspects of your project:

Content: Just like any other essay, you are expected to make your points in a well thought out and clear manner. In the sciences, being concise is generally desired, so you need to make a complete and convincing argument not necessarily long one.
References: Links to web pages that either support or dissent from your position. There should be at least four of each. You should summarize and discuss the contributions of these pages. You will probably need to use search engines such as Google and web directories such as Yahoo to find pages relating to your issue.
Presentation: While I do not expect you to make a professional quality web page, you should use other web pages for very basic style ideas. Pictures and a reasonably well-thought out interface are required. See for http://www.useit.com/ for good ideas and http://www.gui-bloopers.com/ and http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com for bad ones. You can write in a web design program like Dreamweaver or Frontpage or use any program that can output web pages (such as Microsoft Word). You can also use HTML.

Below are possible general topics for your essay. You can answer one of the questions below or you can make up your own as long as it has something to do with computer science and more specifically one of the 4 areas below.

Artificial intelligence: Can computers think? Will computers ever think? Do there exist problems that computers will never be able to solve, even though human beings can?
Programming languages: Is Java a suitable language for introductory computer science classes? Is programming an important part of a "liberal arts" education?
Computers and society: Discuss the "Digital Divide" where American society is increasingly being divided into technology haves and have-nots. Is this divide a major problem? How did the Internet evolve and what have been the effects? Is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or the new Patriot anti-terrorism legislation a good idea
Software publishing and ethics: Is free software a good model for development and innovation? What constitutes an operating system and how did that affect the Microsoft antitrust ruling?
Digital media: Will digital media (such as audio and video) change the entertainment industry? Do technology makers have a duty to make or limit their products so that the products cannot be used to potentially illegally copy copyrighted media?
Innovative applications of computing: One might say that the much of the most interesting computer science research happens outside of computer science groups these days. Investigate a topic in bioinformatics (genomics, modeling plants using L-systems, etc.) or the use of computers in entertainment (e.g. virtual reality, computer usage in music, computer generated images in movies, and so on)
Computer security and privacy: These are related topics but together they are much too broad. Explore the tradeoffs.

Tips

The content of your essays must refer to specific technologies that are available. It is not enough to talk about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act without mentioning specific systems and technologies that could be affected. Your essay should not just be a treatise on the rights of record companies.
A way of improving your essay is to actually correspond with experts in the field that you are studying. You can easily find the email address for most professors, for example, online. However, this is likely to be fairly low yield. Most e-mail queries come across to the professor as an invitation to write some of your paper for you. You're likely to get nothing. A few minutes of one-on-one conversation, if you can arrange it, may be more productive.
If you plan to do this, keep your inquiries short and expect a short reply, don't harass anyone, and start early because you probably will not hear back from people early if at all.
Google is your friend. Whenever you need to find a page or a person related to particular topic, searching with Google will probably give you a good start.