Variation Jam {

Grade

• 30% of final grade

Deadlines

• 🔥 Section B: 23:59, 2 December 2025
• 🔥 Section AA: 23:59, 3 December 2025
• 🔥 Section A: 23:59, 4 December 2025

That is, you have five weeks from assignment.

If there is a serious need for an extension, contact your instructor at least 3 days before the final deadline.

Objectives

• Deploying the full set of programming skills covered in the course, including arrays, loops, and data-structures.
• Understanding how a basic underlying experience can be made distinctive through different programming approaches
• Creating a more polished work that could be part of a portfolio

Brief

Start with an existing simple experience create a minimum of three distinctive variations on that experience. Your starting point can be a previous project, including frogfrogfrog or something completely new.

Your final project should include a menu that allows the user to select amongst the different variations when the program loads. This menu can either be a series of links on a webpage or README to separate project folders (easiest) or a more sophisticated menu system within the program itself (consult with instructor for approaches to this).

Make sure to document the nature of your variations in your README.md file.

Feel free to borrow from any of the example code you’ve seen so far in the course, but make sure to attribute in your README.md.

References

Consider work like PONGS, SNAKISMS, and Chesses to get a sense of what this could mean (though your underlying system may be simpler than these).

How to start a project

Remember to take this basic steps to get going:

1. Download the template project
2. Rename that folder, maybe to variation-jam
3. Put that folder in your cart253 repository somewhere
4. Commit and push that change with a message like “Started the variation jam”
5. Keep committing and pushing as you go along to max out your commitment grade

Advice

1. Start early. Don’t delay thinking about the project. Get your ideas together early so that you’ve got a good amount of time to work on them.
2. Start small. Think of the smallest possible version of what you want to make and make that first. Once it works, you can start adding to it.
3. Seek help. Ask for help early to discuss your idea and work out ways to achieve it, as well as to get specific technical help as you run into problems. If you can’t think of an idea, ask for help with that.
4. Be stylish. Make sure you read the style guide.
5. Be committed. Remember your grade is heavily affected by your use of version control and writing good commit messages.

Submission

Submission will take place on Moodle. Go to the appropriately named assignment on the Moodle and then submit your work there.

Your submission should just be plain text that includes (substituting your GitHub username and any difference in the folder names):

1. A link to your exercise code (e.g. https://github.com/pippinbarr/cart253/tree/main/assignments/variation-jam/)
2. A link to your project running online (e.g. https://pippinbarr.github.io/cart253/assignments/variation-jam/)

🔥 Make sure that your project actually runs online before you submit 🔥

🔥 Make sure that comment your project before you submit 🔥

🔥 Make sure that you have written a README.md before you submit 🔥

Evaluation

See the assignment rubric on Moodle for details.

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