In Lab

Start the assignment this week, and show your storyboard draft to your lab instructor as indicated below.

Assignment

Pair programming in this lab and assignment. That means working in a team of two, submitting your work together, and working together on one computer. You will sometimes be required to switch partners for the first few pair assignments, and you may have the partner of your choice after that. Your partner must be in your lab section. If there are an odd number of students in your lab, some one person will not have a partner. Pick your partner for this assignment now!

Review the Pair Programming Policies section of the course Syllabus page and follow it carefully. Note especially the submission instructions. The Why and How of Pair Programming section of the Learning Help page contains suggestions on how to avoid problems and get the most benefit from pair programming.

Login to your computer. It doesn't matter whether you use your Network ID or your partner's. You should both keep backups of your work whenever you finish a session working together.

Build an animation for an electronic greeting card (any occasion you choose: birthday, get well, etc.). You might get ideas from http://free.bluemountain.com.

The animation is to be a movie (that is, not interactive) and include the following features:

1. At least two loops.
2. At least two new methods (not including World.my first animation).
3. At least one of your methods is called more than once.
4. A total running time of between 20 and 60 seconds.
5. Comments that describe the overall action performed by each method, as well as any other comments within methods that make them easier to understand (and do more than paraphrase the code).

Be sure there is a justification for the methods you create. (Do not just pick at random a few lines of code, and put them together to form a method.)

You may wish to include sound, introduced in section 4.2, but as always in this course, do not use copyrighted material (unless you hold the copyright).

First create a graphical or textual storyboard for your animation. Show a draft of your storyboard to your lab instructor before the end of the lab (for lab participation credit). Your instructor may recommend changes to your storyboard if it is too sketchy, too ambitious, too easy, or otherwise inappropriate as a plan for this assignment. Use the remainder of the lab period to revise or refine your storyboard as needed and then get started on the programming.

Next week your team will make a three to six minute presentation to your lab (20% of your assignment grade), including a demonstration of the program you submitted and comments on what you learned about Alice programming and pair programming while doing this assignment. Presentation in the larger Thursday lab may be limited to three minutes. You may wish to point out interesting parts of your program in the Alice editor after running your program. Both team members should share the presentation time. It is a good idea to have brief notes to guide your presentation.

As always, submit work (in this case an .a2w file) by attaching it to the corresponding Oncourse assignment. Review the submission instructions on the System Notes web page. You will loose credit if your submission is not done properly. As always with pair programming, note especially:

• responsibility for submission is shared by both of you.
• there is a grading penalty if more than one person in a group makes the submission, for this confuses the grading process
• for both of your to get credit, both of your names and usernames must be in the comment that begins your program (in this case at the start of world.my first method)

As usual, submissions are due by 3pm on Thursday. The program you demonstrate in the next lab must be your final submission, so for this assignment the penalty late submission period ends at the start of your next lab, which is less than the usual two days.