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91.301 Organization of Programming Languages
Prof. F. Martin

Final Project Proposal - Due Tue Nov 25

In this assignment, you will produce a plan for your OPL final project.

Please note: Electronic submissions are preferred to paper-based ones (though both are acceptable). If you are submitting electronically, any standard file format is acceptable (e.g., MS Word, MS PPT, OpenOffice equivalents, PDF) except MS Word docx format. Do not submit projects in MS Word .docx format; use .doc instead.

Please submit to assignment 301-fpprop (Final Project PROPosal). Do NOT name your proposal “project-proposal.doc.” Instead, be sure to include your real-name/username in the filename; e.g., fredm-opl-proposal.doc. To submit it, use the following (e.g.):

  submit fredm 301-fpprop fredm-opl-proposal.doc

Guidelines

The final project is worth 30% of your overall class grade, so it should represent a significant work effort.

Here are the things that will make a high-quality project:

  • explicit connection to ideas that were introduced in the course
  • explicit connection to some outside piece of technology (e.g., images, sound, networking, database, etc)
  • an interesting overall concept
  • something that you personally are interested in and care about
  • a writeup that explains what you accomplished
  • demo that lets people (or yourself) interact with your project

The Proposal

The proposal itself is a written document that explains what you are going to do. It should:

  • include a description of what you intend to build
  • describe any proof-of-concept work you have already accomplished
  • have at least one diagram illustrating the major technology pieces of your proposed project
  • discuss your motivations for the project (how you came to select it, what makes it interesting to you, what you hope to gain from working on it)
  • include a schedule of work, for the 16 days starting with Tue Nov 25 (final project is due with in-class demo on Dec 11)
  • be 3 to 5 pages in length

Here is an example of an excellent proposal. Please take a look at it.

Note, you may wish to start project in earnest work before you turn in the proposal next week. Indeed, the warm-up assignment due today is hopefully that. In any event, it would definitely make sense to do some proof-of-concept work over the next week and use that as the basis of your proposal.

In short: You should be proposing something that you have high confidence that you can achieve.

Grading

The following rubric will be used to evaluate the final project itself. The percentages given are percent of overall class grade, so they total 30%.

5% quality of proposal document (see what it should include above)
5% degree/quality to which project makes use of concepts taught in the course (please be explicit about this in the project writeup)
5% extent to which project integrates with some external technology
5% innovation in overall concept (please do explain what is interesting about it)
5% quality of final writeup document
5% quality of in-class demonstration of project (with accompanying poster -- this will be assigned)