University of Wisconsin-Madison

Computer Science is about creating. In computer science, you have opportunities to solve problems no one else has solved before; you can design applications no one has thought of before; you have the power to develop games no one else has played before. In computer science, you have opportunities to read, analyze, think, reflect, and write, but, in the end, it is mostly about what you can create.

This ability to create new things through programming is what many people find most exciting about computer science. Through the project in this course, we hope that you will experience some of this excitement. The project will be somewhat open-ended and allow you to show some creativity and original thought. We hope you use this project to create something you find interesting and are motivated to do.

The projects in this course will all be using Scratch. You are expected to devote much more time to a programming project than to one of the weekly homeworks. Programming assignments and projects in this class should be done on your own. You may ask other students in the class questions, but you may not share code with anyone in the class. You may not use existing code that you find elsewhere, including the Scratch website. You may look at the behavior of existing Scratch projects for inspiration, but you should develop all of your code as a completely new project and not modify, re-mix, or build from any one else's code.

The Instructor and the TA are very happy to give you suggestions on how to implement your ideas. We won't necessarily give the answer, but we will try to guide you to a reasonable implementation. If you have bugs in your code (i.e., it isn't behaving like you expect), we are happy to take a look and see if we can see the problem. But, again, don't wait until the last minute to do your project if you are hoping for any advice!

More details about the project will be available here later.

The Fall 2011 project is create a card game in Scratch with a project partner.