Matlab Project

One Project: Admin Detail

Pick a project. See BB for due date... mid-december.

Good News: choice of any one (1) of three projects.

Bad News: we won't spend much class time on any single one.

So... you have to look at them and read the background pretty much unsupervised and pick and do it.

Good News: I believe the tutorial material is adequate for 173 without any lecturing help from me.

Ray Casting: Traditional, is fun, is graphics, gets good reviews, fair amount of background reading and some non-trivial geometry.
Linear Algebra: From 160, a 2nd-sem. freshman course for frosh with no previous programming experience. Research project: does pivoting really help in a particular class of problems, when and how much?
ODEs: From 160. Learn about ordinary differential equations, and use them to solve a ballistics problem. Cannons are "easy", Baseball is a full-blown research project.

MY opinion: easiest to hardest with some tradeoffs:

ODEs. Tutorial is significant but not massive (10 pages?), problem after that is actually easy (not much code).
Linear Algebra. If you know about systems of linear equations, big head start. Code is pretty easy, the experimental part is a bit of a slog but not hard.
Ray tracing: given that we can't spend 2 lectures on the background, you have to deal with the tutorial material (some 3-D geometry) and the coding is non-trivial but not huge, and it's rewarding.