CIS-332 -- Project

CIS-332 -- Principles of Operating Systems

Professor: Franz J. Kurfess

Home page:http://www.cis.njit.edu/franz   E-mail:franz@cis.njit.edu

Project CIS 332

One of your assignments for the course is a project, contributing 20% to your overall grade. For your project, you can choose between three options:

construction of a World Wide Web page (team project)
a research paper
a community service project

These options are described in more detail below. Those of you interested in community service should contact Ann Wilson from the Office of Community and Public Service; please follow the deadlines and format for the research paper.

You have to submit the project in two stages: first a short outline or draft version in which you describe the structure of your paper / program / Web page(s), and then the final version, which is the full paper, complete program, or complete set of Web pages.

The deadlines are

Thursday, March 13, 1996 for the outline
Tuesday, April 22, 1996 for the final version

Research Paper:

For this research paper, you have to demonstrate the ability to read an article from a professional research journal (like IEEE Computer or Communications of the ACM), describe its main ideas in your own words, and use the knowledge you acquired in class. The task is to read the paper "The Anti-Mac Interface" by Don Gentner and Jacob Nielsen, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 39, No. 8, August 1996 pages 70-82, and write a research paper on the issues relevant to the topics discussed in class, especially the relation between the user interface and the operating system of a computer. A copy of the article can be found in the library (CIS 332 / Kurfess).

Your paper has to be 7-10 pages long in a font no larger than 12 points; however, it is not the number of pages that makes a good paper but the contents. My evaluation will be based on the following criteria; the number indicates the points you can get (100 in total):

coverage of relevant topics (60)
presentation and readability (20)
originality (10)
bibliography (10)

Some hints:

Try to describe things in your own words. Parts of your paper which are practically identical to your source will not count for coverage and originality, and you risk a bad grade for copying. This is a serious issue, and some students from previous semesters were not very happy aobut their grade as a consequence of their copying.
Have discussions with your fellow students about the paper. You will have to write your own paper, however. If you do the Web page team project, the grade will be for the whole team.
Use a spellchecker or ask somebody to go over your paper to eliminate the worst mistakes. Whereas grammar and spelling are not taken into account for your grade, it might leave a bad impression or make your paper difficult to understand if there are many mistakes.
You have to find additional sources of information, e.g textbooks, Web pages, computer magazines like Byte, or other journal articles. Don't forget to list them in the bibliography section!

Here is an example for the structure of such a paper:

Title Page
	(Author, Title, Affiliation)
Introduction
	(background, history, problem description, overview of the systems)
Main Part
	relevant issues for operating systems
	relation operating systems 
Conclusion
	(advantages, problems, future developments)
Bibliography
        (cite all articles and books you have used, including the textbook)

Community Servide

In general, the requirements are similar to the ones described above for the research paper. An example of a an outline is here.

World Wide Web Page

In this case, you have to put together material about one particular operating system topic and arrange it into a collection of WWW pages. The material you collect should be especially useful for future generation of CIS 332 students. For each topic, it should have the following structure

Introduction
Definitions of terms
Descriptions and explanations of the concepts or methods for the topic
Demonstrations and examples
Exercises and interactive quizes (multiple-choice questions)
Realizations in real operating systems like MS Windows 95/NT, Macintosh OS, OS/2, Unix, VMS, MVS, etc
Bibliographical and historical notes, with pointers/links to a general references section

This option will be solved as a team effort.

World Wide Web Hints

Where to find further information, e.g. how to install your own home page on the hertz system (might be a little outdated by now).

CIS 332 Principles of Operating Systems Spring 1997 Franz Kurfess.