Assignments With Relevance Gary Hull Spotswood High

Assignments With Relevance Gary Hull – Spotswood High School ghull@spotswood. k 12. nj. us

Background Where I teach • Spotswood High School • Approximately 700 students • Many students involved in extracurricular activities What I teach • • Computer Applications and Programming I and II Honors Programming Honors Networking Advanced Placement Computer Science

Mr. Spotswood Pageant Overview • Pageant for Senior guys • 12 compete in four different events Problem encountered • Scoring was paper-based and was tabulated manually • 576 scores had to be tabulated • Long wait between competition end and winner announcement

Mr. Spotswood Programming Competition Assignment Goals • To make the score calculation more efficient and accurate through the use of a scoring application • Introduce students to real-world application development skills Overview • Teams of 3 Honors Programming students compete against one another • Use Microsoft Visual Basic 6. 0 to create a scoring application Deliverables • Application Proposal • Mr. Spotswood Application • Application Presentation Incentive • Winning team members receive gift certificate to local electronics store

Mr. Spotswood Programming Competition Assignment – Student Introduction Before work is started • As a class, we go through the Mr. Spotswood Application Requirements/Deadline document This document gives students • An overview of the Mr. Spotswood pageant • The basic requirements of the application • Students are expected to gather all requirements through interviews with key stakeholders • A description/timeframe for all deliverables required • An idea of how their grade is calculated • A description of the incentive

Deliverable #1 – Application Proposal Description • The proposal details • The application requirements • How the system will meet those requirements • Encourages students to prototype their application quickly using VB • Allows me to ensure that students are off to a good start Timeline • Due ~1. 5 weeks after the assignment is discussed Format • Word document incorporating Visual Basic screenshots

Deliverable #2 – Mr. Spotswood Application Description • Students spend the bulk of their time on this deliverable • What does it do? • The application is used by a judge to enter in all contestant scores • The application then tallies and sorts the scores in order to create the winner lists • Ultimate goal is to reduce score compilation time to 0 • New features of the programming language (VB) are introduced on a daily basis • Introduced within the context of the assignment • Helps the material become more relevant to the students Timeline • Due 4 -5 weeks after the assignment is initially discussed Format • VB Project/standalone executable

Deliverable #3 – Application Presentation Description • Students present and try to “sell” their application to a team of judges • Judges use a pre-designed scoring rubric to “grade” the applications Timeline • Due at the end of the assignment Format • Oral presentation using Power. Point

Outcome High degree of student involvement • Study halls, lunches, after hours spent programming Skills Built • Programming/Application development • Greatly enhanced skill set • Teamwork • Sales/persuasiveness

Future Enhancements Partner with local electronics store (Best Buy) Database interaction Distributed processing • Palm Pilots for judges • Web front-end