Suggested IB Comp Sci Dossier Topics for FIS
by Dave Mulkey, 2006

Here are some suggested topics for my students. Many of them are for me, so I would be the intended real user.

Applications (DB = database oriented)

• Web-Addresses DB - rather than a list of links on a web-page, or the lists I have in SaveThis.com, I'd like a nice searchable DB of web-sites, with http addresses, description of contents. Should include key-words. It would be nice if these could be extracted automatically from the web-page itself (or Google description) and then stored in the DB
   
• Web-Site generator - should be VERY EASY to use, for inexperienced and impatient teachers, or very young students. Needn't be flexible - should be template or wizard based, not using an HTML editor. Can start with one simple template (e.g. navigation left, title top, content right). Add other templates later (maybe). Should produce pages out of a data-base or file(s)

• Daily welcome-page generator for the computer labs. Generates a web-page with a quote of the day, announcements, reminders, assignments, etc. The page sits on a server (lab329). Each PC has short-cut to this file. Should make old pages available, so students can look back at something from last week. Could include link to daily bulletin. The program must include features for recording lists of data (e.g. quote of the day) as well as generating the web-page automatically.

• CAS projects DB - stores list of students with areas of interest, plus list of projects with similar keywords, and tries to match students with projects. Also keeps a record of currently active projects, so the CAS coordinator can keep tabs on what students are doing.

• Worksheets Manager - A DB for teachers to keep track of and manage their worksheets and other teaching materials. Should be able to click on a file name and add it to the DB, together with keywords and description

• Friends Tracker DB - Keep track of friends' e-mail addresses, ICQ name, Handy number, and other contact info. Should be able to merge lists from several friends together, so they can share. This is probably an SL project.

• Calendar - appointments, holidays, events. Should be able to merge calendars from various people together - for example, merge all the events from various calendars.

• Computer Lab Scheduler - a calendar/database for scheduling classes into computer labs (or library or auditorium). Must keep track of teachers' names, date and time, and must correctly show the letter day (A-H)

• Knowledge Exchange (Volunteers) - a database e-mail addresses (and possibly phone numbers) for students, teachers and parents. Each record includes a list of interests/hobbies/keywords identifying issues where this person is willing and able to answer questions. For example, a French speaker might volunteer to do short translations for other people. A math teacher might volunteer to help students with homework. A hobby cook might volunteer to share recipes. The application should be able to search for a topic (e.g. French) and provide a list of matching e-mail addresses that can easily be copied into an e-mail address field.

• IT Software DB - Our school has a large collection of software. The setup files are stored on a server, but without any documentation. We have a few lists of required software for various installations - the labs are different from the library, and those are different from the teachers' machines. A good support database would have records of the names of software titles, where they are stored, notes about installation tricks, as well as lists of software to be installed for specific machine types.

• IT Tips and Tricks - a database of FAQs, hints, instructions, tips and tricks, etc. - for teachers, students, and parents. The database should include keywords for each record, and provide both keyword and full-text searching. It would also be nice if it could produce HTML pages as output.

• IT Maintenance - a database for tracking maintenance problems and activities. Maintenance records must include: problem description, date of problem, description of solution, date finished, keywords. Should be searchable by keyword or full text, and should produce various reports (e.g. according to keyword).

• Web Notes Collector - students doing research and teachers preparing lessons may visit lots of web-sites and find a few useful ones. They can store these in IE favorites or write them on a sheet of paper. But neither of these methods is well suited to the problem. They need a very quick, easy, and reliable method for saving the URL and a few short notes about the useful thing they found there. The time and date would also be useful. It should be possible to search the database and/or print out subsets of the data later.

• Software Trainer (Tutorial maker) - used by a teacher to create a set of instructional screens to lead someone through the use of a program. For example, a set of screens showing how to use Paint-Shop-Pro to make a transparent logo and save it in a GIF file. YOU (the programmer) are not supposed to make the lessons. Rather, you make a tool so that it is easy for a teacher (or student) to make and save lessons. This should be quick and easy to use so a non-expert can make lessons - e.g. a math teacher could make lessons about using a graphing program. Avoid fancy multi-media stuff - simply some text and a single screen-shot picture on each page is sufficient.

 
Data Mining

This is a general concept, referring to finding data sources on the web and "refining" these to produce more specific, useful information. For example, the CIA factbook has lots and lots of data about countries, but it is probably too much data for most purposes. A program could present smaller, more useful subsets of the data. It could also offer the ability to do clever searching and sorting. Some possible data-mining areas are:

• CIA Factbook - https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html

• Dictionaries – http://freedict.org/en/

• US Census Bureau – http://www.census.gov/

• Social Studies Data - http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/org/index.html

• USDA Example - Farmers Computer Usage - http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/usda.html

There are many other possibilities. In some cases you will find data embedded in HTML files or structured text files. Then in addition to putting a nicer, more usable interface on to of the data, you also need to extract the data by parsing the file. Here are a few examples:

• Project Gutenberg (free online books) – http://www.gutenberg.org/

• Forbes Lists (mostly about money) – http://www.forbes.com/lists/

• Wikipedia Lists - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_reference_tables

• Internet Usage Stats - http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

If you choose a data-mining type of project, keep in mind that you must still have a real user - so you cannot just make up something that you find interesting. And you must still show mastery of file operations. Simply inputting data from a pre-existing file does not show mastery of files. You would need to do something else, like reading the original files, extracting part of the data, and recording subsets in other files.
 

Educational (for students)

• Vocabulary Trainer - maintains a list of vocabulary words. Presents them either randomly or according to some plan. Keeps track of missed words, so student can work on those again later. Student can add new words themselves, or merge an entire list from the teacher (or other students)

• Drill and Practice (especially math) - timed practice on math facts, including calculations. Questions can come from a long list of simple problems, or be generated randomly according to rules

• Multiple Choice Quiz Generator - stores a DB of questions. Allows teacher to generate a multiple choice quiz, in a variety of ways: printed, on-line, on-line random order. Would be nice if it could include 1 picture for each record, but that should simply be a text input telling the path and name of the file (could use file-open command to retrieve). Online needs to give a score, but NOT store this in a central file.

• Nations Intro DB - stores basic info about various nations, the kind of info a casual tourist might want before traveling there. For example, capital city, time-zone, tourist attractions, money exchange rate, etc. This should include some web-links for further info.

 
Games (probably SL)

• Memory Game (SL) - turn cards over and find matching cards. This could be based on vocabulary practice where a word must be matched with it's definition, or matching a word with a picture.

• Hangman (or other word-guessing) - Selects a random word from a list in a file and lets the user guess. Word-list maintenance is the significant part of the program, not the game. Could have various lists of words on different topics.

• Text Adventure - move from room to room, fight monsters, collect weapons, etc. Scenario (rooms and rules) must be stored in a file, so it is possible to change the game or to make various different games. Use pointer references (a web) to store connections

• Checkers (or other board game) - more appropriate for SL. Should include the ability to remember the sequence of moves and save these in a file and replay the game later.

• Concentration - a TV game show where a large picture is hidden behind cards. The cards are in pairs and must be turned over two at a time and matched (like memory). Players win prizes for the items they match, and a big prize figuring out the message in the hidden picture. The program should choose a picture at random and mix up the pairs of cards randomly.

Utilities

• Document Index Maker - makes a list of words found in a document (can be .txt or .html), possibly with frequency count and location in file. Can save words in a text file (or RandomAccessFile). Should provide tool to merge several lists together - thus the vocabulary from several documents becomes a vocabulary list for a class for the whole term. Could be used as basis for vocabulary, hangman, drill & practice above.

• Program Launcher - can save a sequence of programs that should run and then launch them in that order automatically. For example, load all your favorite applications and web-sites when you start the computer. This could also become a standard tool for a computer teacher to create start-up lists and configurations for students in their classes, or for standard start-ups for "normal" teachers when they bring their classes to the computer lab.

• Personal Data Assistant - easy to record and retrieve bits of text like passwords, web-site addresses, e-mail addresses. This must be quick and easy and should save it's data-file on a USB stick to make it portable (you must be able to carry this around with you). Simple encryption would be appropriate for the passwords.

• Disk Cleanup - this is like a "file-manager", but more structured and less flexible. It should do things like: moving groups of files to a new folder, finding duplicate files (for deletion), find large files (for archiving or deletion), find very old files, etc. This only need to move files around - nothing fancy like encryption of compression. It must be organized to have straightforward tasks which are highly automated and make it quick and easy to clean up a disk drive. This could keep a "log" of all the changes, so it is possible to look back and find out where a file went if it is missing later.

 
Wizard Managed Projects

Some computer users need to do tasks using several pieces of software and various other resources. They might only do the task one time (or once a year), so they might not know what they need to do. They want a "wizard" to guide them through the process. Applying to colleges is a good example:

• College Applications Wizard - helps senior students manage their college applications. This will include web-links and advice from counselors, as well as connections to automatically start needed software - like a word-processor to type a personal essay, or running the UCAS online registration system. The important part about this application is that the counselors must be able to modify the information (instructions) easily, and create profiles for different types of students - e.g. applying to US colleges involves different steps than applying to the UK. The program will be a success if it makes it easier for the counselors and students to keep their work organized. It might also include check lists so the counselors can easily track students' progress. You definitely want to talk to a counselor before starting this - if the counselors are not interested, don't bother with the project.

There are lots of other tasks in school - e.g. the grade 10 project, extended essay - where lots of students undertake a somewhat lengthy and complex task and only do the task one time, so they need guidance and resources and the teachers may want to track their progress.

 
Math Stuff

• Math Problem Trainer - this works by making a template math problem (e.g. some text with numbers, but the numbers are changeable). Then a teacher can make: (1) lots of similar problems; (2) making a template for solutions; (3) produce on-line quizzes.

• High Level Math Calculator - does complex mathematical calculations, like adding up sequences, solving for pieces of triangles, statistics (standard deviation, etc), solve simultaneous equations, matrix calculations, etc. This must be solving math problems, not doing simple calculations like sines and cosines - like the "fancy" stuff in your calculator, but make it a bit easier to use and produce some nicer output. Each type of calculation can be hard-coded (programmed), but must allow the user to input numbers. This project is only appropriate for an HL math student - but you could be doing calculations that would help a Math Studies or younger students. It must be possible to store the results of calculations - otherwise you won't get any data-file mastery marks. Have a look at this: http://www.matheass.de/matheass_en/index.htm, but make something simpler. Perhaps create collections of tools according to lessons in math classes (e.g. sine rule, cosine rule, bearings in one group).

• Function Investigator - a student (or teacher) types a function in like this: 3*x^2 - 4*x + 2. The program can produce a variety of results: the derivative, the integral, the roots, the graph, etc. There should be a variety of standard formulas available, stored in a file and the user can select the formula they want, then type in the exact numbers (e.g. coefficients). It should be possible to store a set of results (reports) for later use (e.g. Printing). A better version (especially for HL) would allow the user to type any formula as text, and parse that formula into a standard tree form.

More Ideas

• Mr Mulkey's hints: http://ibcomp.fis.edu/projects/newproj/projectstart.pdf

• Mr Jones' site http://www.ib-computing.com/java/dossier/HL_examples.html (HL)
  http://www.ib-computing.com/java/dossier/SL_examples.html (SL)

• Rhoedy Green's project suggestions: http://mindprod.com/project/projects.html
  stick to the easier ones, like difficulty = 2, and avoid network/web based projects