Computer Program as Project. HELP!!!!

843810

Hey guys. I am a Grade 12 Student and I need to write some sort of educational software for schools. I am thinking of doing a program for grade 3 learners to help them improve their math skills.

Maybe you guys can give me some ideas. It's for my senior year project and I am a little lost. Maybe you guys can give me some advice on the whole "Educational Software" theme.

Any help or ideas will be appreciated.
Thanx a lot!!

darrylburke

Maybe you guys can give me some advice

[_Some advice_|http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/index.html]
[_Some more advice_|http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html]

db

843810

You might as well start now:

1 - go talk with your grade 3 educators and find what they think would be appropriate.
2 - draw screens of what you plan on doing (pencil and paper layout) and have OK-ed by the educators
3 - develop a prototype of the software and have the educators look it over.
4 - fix things as needed according to educators opinions
5 - beta test
6 - make sure all documentation is accurate and up to date
7 - do final demonstration of your project
8 - get a sign off that your project has been completed and delivered.

Since you propose to make software from a specific need for your school, you should get the "school" and your target audience involved. The previous is a very simplistic view of what you need to do to get your project developed. Have fun and please take special note of #6.

843810

Thanx morgalr for the piece of useful advice. I am going to contacting a teacher at the moment, maybe you can, out of a programmers perspective give me some tips for when I write the application. The what to do and what definitely not to do.

843810

When you talk with the teacher, have an idea of the time you have to allocate to your project. Try to get a feel on how many features you can deliver in your allotted time. Do not go along with everything the teacher asks for--this is called scope creep. You need to stay within your time constraints. On implementation:

1 - do not procrastinate, you are not going to believe how much time is going to be involved in making changes and tweaking the project. Doing things for yourself is easy, now you have to be a mind reader, Houdini, and developer all in one--the problem is that a lot of the time, your client (the teacher) will not agree from one meeting to another on what they want: they tend to "think about it" between meetings and change their minds.

2 - if you find things are getting too complicated--you're right, take a deep breath, have a Pepsi, take a walk and come back and look at things with a more objective outlook and see if you can simplify--don't be afraid to rewrite, many times it will be easier, more maintainable, and quicker just to rewrite that piece of code than it will be to try to coerce a bad design into the project.

3 - don't use autogenerated code: if you cannot make it yourself, then what you are inviting with autogenerated code is a point in your project where you have no idea how to fix what is wrong--because it's in the autogenerated code.

4 - BEFORE you start your project, become intimately familiar with the debugger in your IDE. The debugger is your best tool for fixing problems. Lean how to use it.

These are just a few. Hope thy help you out.

BTW: let me relate this to you--My senior project in college was to make a crosscompiler. We worked in 4 person teams on it and our class had 4 teams. My team chose a simple approach and the other 3 teams had really impressive specs and implementation goals. My team finished, got the A, and all was well. The other 3 teams recieved incompletes, and eventually substantially lesser grades than an A, because their scope was too broad. One of the most significant parts of the project is knowing what can be done in the time allotted--don't choke by biting off more than you can handle.

843810

Thanx a lot man. You don't realize how much you have helped me. You gave me a better perspective on things. :-D