CS 230 Fall 2009                                               

Assignment 11 – Arrays (and what went before) --  Extreme Photoshopping with the Stars!

100 Assignment Points

Assigned: 11/23/2009

Due: 12/07/2009 at the start of class  This includes two labs. However, if you leave campus before the lab on 11/24, that is not an excuse for a late program.

Pre-Lab (Do Before Lab):  Bring materials – a way to save a copy for you and a copy to turn in. Read through the whole assignment; hints and details are spelled out throughout. Plan out tasks, objects, and events needed for program.  Plan out major  pseudocode.

Main Assignment Description:

The LSUNBC TV network is planning a new TV show in which a celebrity and a regular person work together to ‘photoshop’ a picture of the star to make them look better. Each team will be judged by a panel of up to 10 judges. LSUNBC needs a program to calculate the contestants’ scores during the show. The program first obtains from the user via the GUI the name of the contestant, then reads the contestant’s scores from the file named contestantname.txt (i.e. if the contestant’s name is ‘wilson’, the scores will be in a file named ‘wilson.txt’). If any line of the file includes invalid data (non-numeric, not a whole number, or outside the allowable range (0-10)), then a message should be displayed and no results be displayed. Valid scores should be put into an array, since we will need to go back and revisit those scores. Then, for the current contestant, the final score should be calculated as a form of “Middle mean” in which the average of scores other than the highest score and the lowest score is the result. Finally, if all inputs are ok, then the program should display all judges scores from highest to lowest (in a rich text box), the high score, the low score, the total of the values used (i.e. without the max and min), and the middle mean. 

Provide the capability to:

· Score a contestant

· clear (input and outputs)

· exit

Please set the name of the project to something other than the default name (WindowsApplication1, …). It is helpful if you use a name that identifies you as well as the assignment (e.g. yourlastname assignment 11).

Background Knowledge:

· Judges rating should be whole numbers

· No knowledge of Photoshopping, TV shows, celebrities, etc is needed except as given here.

· To help make clear the idea of the middle mean, an example:

o Scores: 5,6,7,8,9,3,5,6,8,7

o Ordered Scores: 9  8  8  7  7  6  6  5  5  3

o Max: 9

o Min: 3

o Total without max and min: 52

o Middle Mean: 6.5

Task Details:

• We have covered procedures and functions – I recommend that you continue to use them (e.g. validation, reading from the file, finding the largest value, etc). However, note that previous validation functions need to be adjusted since the user cannot really be blamed for bad input values that are in a file.
• The user should just be able to input the contestant’s name (they don’t know anything about ‘.txt’). Hint: in reading from a file, the file name isn’t anything more than a String, so your program can easily take what is typed by the user and adjust it to be the correct file name.
• If the correct file doesn’t exist, just inform the user and don’t go on with any processing. It could be because they mistyped the name or because the file doesn’t exist, so don’t blame anybody.
• We cannot prompt for users to deal with bad inputs from the file (e.g. a line in a file contains rt, 5.5, -2,  or 11), we can only inform them of the problem so that they can fix the file. DO NOT try to continue and display results if this happens.
• As a simplifying assumption, we will not try to protect against too many or too few judges scores in the file.
• I tried to make this so that you NEED to store the scores in an array. Even if you figure out a way to avoid using arrays, you must use arrays because this assignment is about arrays.
• Do not try to load anything upon the start of the program (as we have generally done with files). The user’s input determines what file will be read.
• Unlike in examples done in class, only the calculate button needs to access the array (and the number of values), so declare these local to the event procedure rather than global. If you were to make these global then once we started on a new contestant, the info from the preceding contestant would need to be forgotten. So you really are doing yourself a favor (along with “doing the right thing”) by defining the array locally.

DO pass the array  (and number of values) to any independent procedures or functions that need it.

• You must use the filename scheme specified above, so I can easily test a bunch of different programs in a row. Sample files will be provided on Blackboard. In the spirit of thorough testing of programs, you should try other versions of files as well.
• The only user entered value is the contestant name. For validation, ensure that the name isn’t empty and the file exists (as discussed above)
• We are only ever dealing with one contestant at a time. Don’t try to keep track of more than one contestant.
• The middle mean can be a decimal.
• In some cases the middle mean will be the same as the regular mean. Make sure when testing that you are doing the middle mean correctly and not just when the middle mean equals the regular mean.

• MAKE SURE YOUR PROGRAM WORKS! (i.e. gets the correct answers) - it doesn’t have to just run, it needs to run correctly!  Now that our program is branching, we need to try more examples to make sure that they work. We want all paths through the program to work correctly. Think, “what different possibilities need to be checked?”For instance, does your program do the right thing when there are file errors?

Miscellaneous:

• You must turn on Option Strict and Option Explicit
• Put YOUR NAME, e-mail address, date, and purpose of the program in comments at the beginning of the program. The purpose should be what the program is supposed to do, not the learning goals.  
• You MUST include comments that explain your program in order to get full credit.
• Name all textboxes, rich text boxes and buttons meaningfully, and use conventions for ending their names. Also, any labels referred to in code should also be named meaningfully.
• Any variables that you declare should have meaningful names – descriptive of the data that they hold.
• Make any textboxes and rich text boxes that user should never enter a value in “Read Only” (or use labels instead of textboxes!)
• Put your name on the form as a Label or as part of the form title.
• Try to use good user interface design. Make clear what user needs to do and what the answers mean. I will show you my bare bones prototype if you want, but I’m sure you can improve on it.

Hand in:

• Compressed (zipped) folder with your entire project containing all files related to the project, submitted to Blackboard.  Please name the zip file something along the lines of yournameAssignment11
• Print out of your code.