On your web site, make sure that the following are visible:
an image, video or other deliverable of your final product
documentation of your design process
a 3-5 minute video (or slide deck with embedded audio) of your design analysis
On Ed:
we'll post videos to the Showcase discussion during the next Wednesday following the deadline
Construct an interactive lantern that demonstrates the impact of connections on community structure in a social network.
Your lantern should:
Have a neopixel to represent each vertex in the network
Use the color of the neopixel to represent the communities detected by the Girvan & Newman algorithm
Depict fixed edges in the network
Support a small number of interactive edges; e.g., using capacitive touch to (de)activate an edge
When a user interacts with the edge, change the colors of the neopixels to reflect the new communities
We estimate that this project should take you ~12-16 hours. You will submit everything through your portfolio web site, including:
written documentation of your process (40%)
articulate your goal(s)
record your approach
lots of notes/photos/videos, especially when things don't go as planned!
any code (or a link to any code) that you produced or used
your final product (photos and video of the artifact) (10%)
a slide deck that presents your project (20%)
This should include:
your goal and inspiration
your final product and how it demonstrates the impact of connections on community structure
highlights of your design/build process, including 1-2 examples of key moments (e.g., a failure point and how you recovered, an unexpected success)
a 3-5 minute video presentation of (1) your project and (2) analysis of your problem-solving process (30%)
(1) You should use your slide deck for presenting your project.
(2) You may find the following prompts helpful in organizing the analysis of your problem-solving process. Be as specific as possible, while also recognizing the limitations of the time constraint. You will not be able to walk through everything you did, but will need to nominate takeaways and important points.
How did you go about this project?
What parts did you find straightforward?
What was challenging?
What supported your understanding?
Were there embodied elements that helped you? Could you think of others?
What part of the process is a black box to you?
For example: You may have found code online that implements a cellular automaton and you used that to generate your creation. You may have altered the starting generation and associated drawing code. Perhaps how the automaton produces the next generation is a "black box" -- you know what to give it and what it outputs, but you do not know how the algorithm works. Or you may have an intuitive idea of how it works, but wouldn't be ready to implement it from scratch.
You will be evaluated on the clarity of your communication and the depth of your analysis.
Using the Networking Algorithms classes as your foundation, you must:
Articulate a problem for analyzing community structure in a social network setting
Be as precise as possible; you will, at the very least, want to use a graph for modeling the social connections
Design an approach ("algorithm") for the problem you articulated
Again, be as precise as possible; you most likely will want to use Girvan-Newman as a subroutine
Design and present two instances (particular input) for the problem where your approach produces "extremely different" outputs
These instances should be related by a very small modification (probably to the edges) of the graph
This milestone is a starting draft for your final lantern, keep these guidelines in mind:
Each vertex will need to be represented by a single neopixel; you probably don't want to have to wire and control more than 10-15 of these
To highlight the impact of a small modification, you'll need to use some sensor (e.g., capacitive touch); you probably don't want to have more than a couple such inputs.
For this homework, you may use any resources you'd like. You must cite them appropriately (e.g., I talked with a peer about my pattern or I adapted this GitHub repo or I gave Gemini this set of prompts).
To be clear, this includes usage of AI tools, as long as you are:
appropriately documentating and citing your interaction, which should include the platform, prompt and screenshots/links of sample parts of the interaction
analyzing how the usage of the tool(s) helped or hindered your design process
NOTE: MHC's access to Google Gemini provides certain protections of your data.
Post to Ed please, as you're probably not the only one!
Ed supports anonymous posting.