Overview

This week will begin working on our final projects. I have the following rough descriptions of who is doing what with whom:

• Trostin and Akshay will be using SDL render geometric graphics. They are working independently, but I'll be trying to nudge them to collaborate.
• Parker also wants to use SDL. He is proposing implementing a Super Mario clone. I don't know enough about SDL to know whether this is too ambitious a goal (I strongly suspect that it is), but I am encouraging him to collaborate with Trostin and Akshay to see what they can do with SDL.
• Caleb also will be exploring SDL for his final project, but his focus will the audio aspects of it. He wants to create some kind of CLI appliation that will use SDL to handle audio.
• Adonis and Dane will be learning to use CMake. Their goal will be to show us simple examples directly from our experience in class this semester of how to use this powerful tool to manage complex software builds.
• Anfal, Ved, Luis and Isaac want to work together on a project involving GUI programming. Specifically, they will explore SFML and use it to create a simple game that will help beginning students in our CS program become comfortable with vim keybindings.
• James is going to explore ncurses, using it to create a TUI based file browser. I can't begin to tell y'all how happy I was to read that!
• Ivan will be creating a Tic-Tac-Toe game. I will encourage him to see if he can use ncurses for the user interface, and hopefully collaborate with James a bit on this.
• Liam, Fikir, and Anar will be working on an implementation of Battleship. This is another excellent project idea, since the data model is simple enough for a class like ours, yet interesting enough to be a fabulous learning opportunity. Once again, it is the UI that would be the challenge, but I've talked to James about this already, and he's willing to be the ncurses guy, and help with the UI for these projects.
• Shangwen and Cody (though they don't know it yet ;-) are working together to further develop the Duration object we began back in week 17. This is such an important (and problematic) area in computation, and one which will both meet the learning objectives of this team and allow them to make a real contribution to our class.
• Jamethiel and Marin will work on a text-based adventure game. The data involved here is much more complicated then with games like Battleship, but the UI is super simple. I nice trade-off? I look forward to seeing what they can come up with.
• Turner will work on a program to convert text into video, and perhaps a CLI tool to upload it to YouTube.
• Johan is using SDL to create a minesweeper game.
• Jackon will use ncurses to create a simple console game that uses vim keybindings (hkjl) to move around the screen.

I will be strongly encouraging anyone who can (and Ivan and Liam, you two definitely can) to write doctests before implementing any code solutions. That way, you will be learning to design your Tic-Tac-Toe or Battleship API before you build it.