The project I'll be tackling is not exactly a unique idea: an app that allows students to enter scores and see their running grade. You can find the Github repository here.
The idea is to improve on what is available in portals like Blackboard. They typically either reveal only what's been attempted, or only the points earned in relation to all points possible. In either case, a student has a hard time determining how they stand without doing math and referring to the syllabus--that they hopefully haven't trashed.
I had the idea when I was making out a spreadsheet to figure out my current actual grade for a math class halfway through a semester. I had formulas laid out to account for the weighting of quizzes versus homework versus tests. It was annoying to set up and I did my math wrong a few times but finally had something that worked--as long as I manually updated the point totals earned every time I added a new score.
This was in the middle of my C# Programming I course, and I had an epiphany--I could write a program that would let me set all this nonsense up once using classes and variables and collections of scores and oh my! I spun up the initial, mostly-working console version full of ugly unwieldy code and showed it to the C# instructor...who quite rightly determined there wasn't much to say except "Solving real world problems is totally how you build your skills."
My project is to apply about a year's worth of constant skill building to that old concept, and make something that resembles a useful program.
The idea is to improve on what is available in portals like Blackboard. They typically either reveal only what's been attempted, or only the points earned in relation to all points possible. In either case, a student has a hard time determining how they stand without doing math and referring to the syllabus--that they hopefully haven't trashed.
I had the idea when I was making out a spreadsheet to figure out my current actual grade for a math class halfway through a semester. I had formulas laid out to account for the weighting of quizzes versus homework versus tests. It was annoying to set up and I did my math wrong a few times but finally had something that worked--as long as I manually updated the point totals earned every time I added a new score.
This was in the middle of my C# Programming I course, and I had an epiphany--I could write a program that would let me set all this nonsense up once using classes and variables and collections of scores and oh my! I spun up the initial, mostly-working console version full of ugly unwieldy code and showed it to the C# instructor...who quite rightly determined there wasn't much to say except "Solving real world problems is totally how you build your skills."
My project is to apply about a year's worth of constant skill building to that old concept, and make something that resembles a useful program.