Assignment No. 3

Creating a Song Flowchart

Date Due: Tuesday, February 23, 2016

What This Assignment Is About
What You Are To Do
Submitting Your Assignment for Grading
How You Will Be Graded

What This Assignment Is About

For this assignment you are to create a flowchart for a song of your choice, similar to the ones introduced in class.

As in Assignment No. 2, this assignment also requires you to work with a partner. We will set up partner pairings so that students in the arts are (for the most part) paired with students in business or the sciences, or at least students in different majors. The pairings will be announced in class and posted on this page. You can then consult the class roster page to find your partner’s (or partners’) e-mail address(es).

This assignment, like all assignments in this course, requires you to work with a partner. See below for your partner assignment.

Partner Assignments Top

Please see the Class Roster for your partner’s email address.

Team No.	Partner 1	Partner 2

What You Are To Do Top

Please remember that all aspects of this project except your reflection are to be done with your partner.
Search the web for sample song flowcharts and review the ones we show you, as well as the flowchart symbols introduced in in the Notes for Class No. 7.
Pick a song to work with that has a simple structure. Write down the URL for that song (assuming that you found it on the Web) so that you can enter it into the appropriate field in the form for entering your responses to the reflective questions. If you did not find your song on the Web, you will need to upload it to the folder you create on Google Drive when you submit your assignment there. This will allow us to listen to the song as we review your flowchart.
Create a flowchart for your song. You may do this on paper, but we prefer that you do it using an online tool as discussed in class. One tool that we strongly recommend is Microsoft PowerPoint, which you are probably already familiar with.

There is a good video on how to create a flowchart with PowerPoint at https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Create-a-flow-chart-af4e3f4c-3854-486a-88ff-eb35692663dc and there are detailed printed instructions at https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Create-a-flow-chart-30F87402-BA3D-48C8-8E9F-A66BCEE7E5AA. There are also many other tutorials on the Web that are easy to find by Googling “how to create flowcharts using powerpoint” (without the quotes). You can also use Word, but the flowchart drawing tools work better in PowerPoint, at least on the Macs in Durgin 406.

Alternatively, you can find software designed specifically for drawing flowcharts by Googling “download free flowchart software” (without the quotes). One such program that gives you a 7-day free trial is SmartDraw, which you can download from http://www.smartdraw.com/specials/flowchart.asp. Others, including a web-based one, can be found at http://download.cnet.com. (You have to search that site once you get there.)

Another interesting free online website that provides facilities to create flowcharts is http://www.flowchart.com. You have to request access to use this program, but at the moment it is still free. This program isn’t the easiest to use, but it has some good features and capabilities. It is actually written in Flash, the same program that is often used to play movies and sounds on web pages.

Yet another free program found by 2014 student Alex Glasser is the Pencil Project at http://pencil.evolus.vn. This software is availabe for all both Windows and Macintosh platforms, as well as Linux. See the Features page (http://pencil.evolus.vn/Features.html) for examples of the shape collections provided, which include flowcharting symbols.

Additional resources recommended by 2016 student Hannah Ewing:

Inspiration — http://www.inspiration.com/Inspiration

30 day free trial — see link in top right corner

you can make charts from templates or design your own

Prezi — https://prezi.com

you can use templates or free form as well import PowerPoint slides that you’ve already made

And here’s a great one from 2016 student Zack Wong:

There is a Google app called draw.io which allows you to design flowcharts and diagrams collaboratively. This can link directly to your Google Drive and even allows you to work collaboratively in real-time like Google Docs. That is, two people can edit the same flowchart on separate computers. To anyone who is using Google Drive to manage their projects, I suggest using this application. The URL is https://www.draw.io/.

Here is the app description: “draw.io Desktop is a completely free, stand-alone desktop diagramming application by the technology leaders in web diagramming. No registration, no limitations, no catches.”

If you created your flowchart with a program or web-based tool, capture it as a graphic file to submit. See (1) under “Submitting Your Assignment for Grading” below for specific instructions on how to do this. If you created it on paper, turn it in so that we can scan it and create a graphic file from it.
Complete the Google Form at:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1LF7WfOlGnLGQ_zvLmsPiuAWpiwjrka-jRCjqXIWZ98o/viewform

to answer the reflective questions for this assignment. To improve your grade, look over our comments on your responses to the reflective questions for Assignment No. 1. If you didn’t get a 5 on your responses to the reflective questions for previous assigments, please make sure you understand what we saw as shortcomings so that you can get the maximum number of points on this individual part of the assignment.

Submitting Your Assignment for Grading Top

For this assignment you and your partner are to submit one file that shows us your flowchart. This may be a screen shot captured from whatever software program you used to create it, a graphic file exported from that software, or your flowchart on paper. Do not submit a raw file saved by your software. We will most likely not be able to grade that.

You are also to submit either a link to a YouTube video or an MP3 file of the song you flowcharted so that we can listen to it as we review your flowchart. To submit a YouTube link, just create a small text file named YouTubeLink.txt and upload that along with your screen shot.

You are to submit your file(s) by uploading them to Google Drive account umlsoundthinking2016@gmail.com as you did for Assignment No. 2. There are detailed instructions for doing this in that assignment. The only difference is that for this assignment, the folder to which you are to upload your file(s) is named Assignment No. 3 File Submissions.

Please note:

Do NOT upload a raw file saved by your flowcharting software (if you used such software)
The screen shot may be a JPG or BMP or PNG or GIF file
Do NOT delete any files from the Google Drive account that you did not upload yourself

EACH of you is then to complete the Google Form at the URL shown in step 6 above

this is the individual part of the assignment
this form will constitute your reflection on this assignment

How You Will Be Graded Top

The two parts of this assignment will be evaluated on the following criteria.

For the Flowchart (15 points)
- Creativity — How well does your flowchart represent the song you chose?
- Problem Solving — Was it evident that you put some thought into this assignment?
For the Reflection (5 points)
- Thoroughness — Did you think about the various aspects of this assignment and their relation to music and computing?
- Effort — Did you leave this until the last minute or is it clear that you thought about what you wanted to write and put some effort into doing the writing?
- Professionalism — Was your writing and its formatting, grammar, spelling, etc. done professionally?

UMass Lowell Dept. of Computer Science

COMP 2120 / MUED 2120 — Sound Thinking

Spring 2016 Semester, Section 201

Prof. Jesse M. Heines and Prof. Gena Greher