Class 36: Design, Revisited

Held Friday, April 9

Summary

Contents

Notes

• Congratulations to Oleksiy: his team placed second in the Iowa Collegiate Mathematics Contest. His team also placed 27th in the nationwide Putnam exam (the highest Grinnell's placed for about twenty years).
• I've made some updates to assignment 8 to make it somewhat less time-consuming. In particular, I've made the programming component only necessary for extra credit.
• The answer key for exam 2 is now ready. I'll update it as I note problems that you encountered.

• Today we return to the problem of ``How should we build a program to support art shows?''
• This program will be your project for the rest of the semester. (You will receive no other assignments.)
  • Different groups will work on different parts of the project.
  • An approximate schedule for stages of each part will be available early next week.
• What are the parts we've identified for the project?
  • A database engine will be responsible for keeping track of the various pieces of information. (Right now, we'll just have artists and pieces of art.)
  • A runner interface will be responsible for supporting the tasks that ``runners'' do: entering information on bids; finding art that goes to auction, etc. This will require a graphical user interface.
  • A administrative interface will support entry and update of information on art, artists, and clients. This will require a graphical user interface. (There will be separate interfaces for art and artists.)
  • A report and analysis engine will be responsible for tabulating information in the database (how much we owe each artist, how much each client owes, etc).
  • A translator will be responsible for converting the data objects (art, artist, buyer) to human-readable form, and back to objects again.
  • A network module will support transmission of this information. Clif and Sam will write the network module, although you'll have to collaborate with specifications.
  • A file module will support storage and retrieval of the database. Clif and Sam will write this module, too.
• What are some objects that are common to most modules?
  • Artist
  • PieceOfArt
  • Buyer
• By next Tuesday, you should have put yourselves in groups of three or four (if you need me to put you into a group, please let me know) and decided on which subprojects you'd like to do (list two; we'll do our best to make sure that you get one of the two).

History

• Created Monday, January 11, 1999.
• Added short summary on Friday, January 22, 1999.
• Filled in the details on Friday, April 9, 1999.