Lab 4A [Project proposals only - if you do the standard lab you should not submit 4A]

  • Due 4 Dec 2023 by 23:59
  • Points 0

Lab 4 will be essentially the same as last year. There are two options, a project, or the standard lab. You need to decide by week 6 which one you will do.   

Here is a short video introducing Lab 4 Links to an external site. (2022)

Project    If you want to do your own project you need to submit short proposal for your lab 4: latest on Monday in Week 6 in the Fire system (marked as 4A).  You submit your project (4B) on Wednesday of week 7, and it will be graded at a short presentation meeting. [2023: we will do grading on Friday 15 December via zoom] 

Standard Lab   If you take the "standard lab" then you should not submit 4A at all - we will assume that you will do the standard lab in that case.  You Submit your complete lab on Wednesday of week 7 (4B) and it is graded as for all the other labs.

Lab 4 is an open-ended lab in which you can design and implement your own mini-project. The idea is to give you the freedom to explore Haskell in a direction of your choosing, if you so wish.

The project should take you around 20 hours of work working in a group of two, so it is best not to choose something too big; make sure that if you choose an ambitious project you should be able to demonstrate your progress even if the whole code is not complete.

For those of you who don't like the uncertainty that comes with such freedom, below we have suggested a complete "standard lab".

The description is split into several parts but you must submit the whole lab in one go as submission 4B. Most students who choose this lab in 2015 (when we did a small survey) were happy with their choice.

Below you will also find some further ideas that you can use as the basis of your project. Some of these come from labs from this course or other courses. You won't be able to assume that we are familiar with all these labs however, but we will help if we can.

Guidelines for your projects

From our previous experience we suggest the following guidelines in choosing and developing a project:

What we expect to see in a project

We expect to see functional programming demonstrating:

  • good functional style, including appropriate use of higher-order functions,
  • appropriate modelling and use of data structures,
  • appropriate use of property-based testing with quickCheck,
  • clean separation between functional code and IO.

Presentation

Projects will be presented over zoom with a 5 minute oral presentation explaining what the project is about and giving a quick demo. The code should be uploaded to Fire in advance so we can have it ready to browse during your presentation and can ask questions about the code. Be prepared to highlight and explain the more interesting/challenging parts of the code!

Any code which is imported or adapted from another source must be clearly acknowledged, even if it is your own earlier work.

Important deadlines

  • Submit short proposal: latest on Monday in Week 6 in the Fire system. If you take the "standard lab" then you just need to say this. Otherwise just send a sentence or two about what you want to do.

    If you do the standard lab it is graded as per the other labs.  If you do your own project you will be mailed a link to a sign-up page for your presentation in Week 7.  

  • Upload project source code to Fire (and any other supporting documents if you have any). The deadline for uploading your project is midnight on Wednesday in Week 7 or 30 minutes before your presentation — whichever one comes first.

    Remember that you are expected to work in pairs and submit via Fire in the usual way.

Some Project/Lab Suggestions

The following are a list of suggestions -- old labs or labs from other courses -- which you can use as the basis for your "project".

  • The 9-men-morris game. Many small games make for nice mini projects. One example is the 9-men-morris Links to an external site. game. (You can play online Links to an external site.).

  • The Game of Amazons Links to an external site.. A more sensible choice than trying to write a chess program - but still challenging. Like with many board games it can be solved in stages, where the first stage is to support a two-player game. Then if you have time you can try and build an AI. More online Links to an external site..

  • Othello/Reversi. Ditto.

  • Tetris. A classic. But don't get too tied up in the GUI stuff. Note that you should not base your solution on any existing Haskell version of the game.

  • [Removed - seen it too often] Minesweeper. Another classic single-player game without any serious graphical needs. For more of a challenge you can try to write a solver.

  • Programming language projects. Functional languages are ideal for implementing programming language tools such as compilers and interpreters. If you have some interest in this then here are labs which might form the basis for a project - here is one from a discontinued course:

Non-recommended projects

  • Conway's game of life. It's too simple and we have seen too many of them.
  • Building a web server using some library. There are indeed some cool web server libraries for Haskell, but they don't make for a good project.
  • Games with very many rules - the problem here is that project can end up wide but shallow.  An example is Chess, which can and has made for a good project, but there really are a lot of rules to take care of, so you need to invest quite a lot of extra time to do something interesting. 
1701730799 12/04/2023 11:59pm