Oliver Holland

Task: Applying what I have learned so far, I was asked to write my own game of Tetris.

Detailed Description of Tasks:

There was no need to implement a fully functional version of the game. Marks were given for individual stages in the game development. The more aspects of the game I implemented the more marks I gained. The breakdown of marks were as follows:

• The UI should be run as an applet that can hold a grid of filled squares. The grid of squares should be of length 10 and of height 20. Initially the grid should be empty. The applet should also display my name and registration number in the title of the applet [10%]
• Objects (i.e. a single square) should first appear in the top row of the grid and then move down a row at a time in fixed intervals. As with the original game, this process stops as soon as the object either hits the bottom of the grid or another object. Only a single object should ever move down the grid at any given time. Eventually the grid will fill up and once a new object can no longer move down at all the game is over. [10%]
• The user should be able to move the (currently active) object to the left or to the right by hitting the left or the right mouse button, respectively. [10%]
• As soon as a row is filled, it should be cleared and all squares in the rows above should move down one row. Each time a row is cleared, your total score should be incremented by 10 points. Maintain a record of the score and display the total score once a round of Tetris is finished. [10%]
• A short report should describe my solution. [10%]
• Do not simply put all code in a single class. I should apply the object-oriented principles I have studied during the module and use appropriate comments throughout my code. [20%]

All of the above will gave me up to 70% of the marks. For full marks I had to try the following which was more of a challenge:

• Go beyond simple squares and use typical Tetris objects instead. One way of doing it was to treat such objects as a composition of primitive objects (squares). [10%]
• Making an object move left or right is only part of a real Tetris implementation. Use the middle mouse button to turn an object clockwise by 90 degrees. With this functionality added I would have a fully functional version of Tetris! [10%]
• In addition to these extras, add some more functionality that makes your game even more interesting to play. [10%]

I managed to implement all the tasks above and was awarded full marks by my lecturer.

Abstract:

Until recently, Reusable Learning Objects (RLOs) available on the web have tended to use Adobe Flash to implement the content. This has obvious disadvantages, such as requiring a Flash player plugin, accessibility and usability impairment, mobile compatibility issues, longer loading times, and difficulties with search engine’s ability to crawl and properly index the content of Flash websites. This project is to develop one or more RLOs utilising HTML5 and JavaScript. RLOs are an effective way of reinforcing concepts taught in a particular subject area and for this project, the chosen subject area was Data Structures & Algorithms.

HTML, first proposed in 1990, was traditionally used as a mark-up language requiring multiple plug-ins to accomplish graphical tasks. This has given programming web-applications bad press among programmers, who find the programming architecture limiting compared to other languages. However, with the introduction of HTML5 in 2014, HTML is becoming more selfsufficient by including graphical utilities. The project demonstrates the power of web-based languages provided by the new standard, plus the benefits from integrating other core technologies such as CSS3, JavaScript and the Bootstrap Framework. This allowed for an aesthetically pleasing and fully-functional, responsive web design that works across a multitude of devices to be produced.

I received a 1st for my dissertation

Assignment 1: Language Models and Smoothing

In this assignment, I was asked to build unigram and bigram language models, implement Laplace smoothing and use the models to compute the perplexity of test corpora. Part of the assignment asked me to do the computation by hand and the latter part asked me to write code for the same.

 

Assignment 2: Text Classification and POS Tagging

In this assignment, I was asked to build a Naive Bayes classifier and use it to do topic classification. It should compute a model given some training data and be able to predict classes on a new test set.

Overall mark for year: 64.0

Module	Coursework	Exam	Aggregate	Class
Professional Development	78.9	55.0	72.0
Mathematics for Computing	62.5	27.0	41.0
Introduction to Programming	74.6	32.5	54.0
Object-Oriented Programming	87.8	37.0	62.0
Introduction to Databases	87.8	37.0	62.0
Web Development	72.5	67.5	70.0
Network Fundamentals	74.7	82.0	79.0
Digital Systems Architecture	72.5	45.0	56.0

Overall mark for year: 72.0

Module	Coursework	Exam	Aggregate	Class
Group Project & Industrial Practice	60.4	74.0	67.0	2.1
Software Engineering	72.5	68.0	70.0	1
Application Programming	81.0	71.0	74.0	1
Data Structures and Algorithms	78.3	72.5	74.0	1
Human Computer Interfaces and Visualisation	90.0	61.0	76.0	1
Operating Systems	60.0	64.0	62.0	2.1
Computer and Data Networks	87.6	63.0	73.0	1
Computer Security	90.0	73.8	79.0	1

Overall mark for year: PASS

Module	Coursework	Exam	Aggregate	Class
Placement Year	PASS		PASS	PASS

Overall mark for year: 80.0

Degree Mark: 77.0

Module	Coursework	Exam	Aggregate	Class
Individual Project	78.3	N/A	78.0	1
Evolutionary Computation And Genetic Programming	83.2	70.0	74.0	1
Natural Language Engineering	92.3	81.0	84.0	1
Large Scale Software Systems And Extreme Programming	76.2	85.0	81.0	1
Network Engineering	98.5	78.5	85.0	1
Network Security And Cryptographic Principles	85.2	76.0	79.0	1