Homework 3: A CGI-Based Scheme Story

Assigned: Wednesday, September 17, 2002
Due: 9:00 a.m., Wednesday, September 25, 2002
No extensions!

Summary: In this assignment, you will build a small (at least four pages) story using HTML, Scheme, and CGI.

Purposes: To give you some experience with useful Scheme and to consider the relationships between Scheme and HTML.

Collaboration: You must work in groups of two or three. You may not work in groups of four. If you are feeling antisocial, you may work alone. If you do work in groups, I'd like you to try working with someone you haven't done a homework with before. You may discuss the assignment with anyone you wish. You may also obtain help from anyone you wish, but you should clearly document that help (perhaps with an extra citations page).

• Assignment
• Basic Expectations
• Suggested Improvements
• Turning It In

Assignment

For many years, parents (and their children, we hope) have celebrated in the opportunity to create personalized stories. The origins of this tradition are lost to the mists of time, but it's likely that personalized stories originated with parents simply subsituting their children and their children's favorite things in the stories they read.

With the advent of modern technologies, it is now possible to fill out a form with information about your child and receive a custom printed storybook. Thrilling! The more sarcastic among you can think of these as electronic Mad Libs.

In this assignment, you should strive to replicate the thrilling experience of personalized storybooks. Your story will begin on a enter information form and then guide the reader through a few pages that are customized according to that initial information and any other information you gather on the additional pages.

Basic Expectations

• Your story should include at least four pages (other than the initial form).
• Each story page should include at least one paragraph.
• Each story page should include at least one value taken from the information form.
• You information form should require at least three pieces of information.
• Each story page should be implemented as a CGI script written in Scheme.
• At least one of the pages should use conditionals (if or cond).
• All of your writing should be grammatically correct.
• All of your pages should be generally accessible, which you can check by trying to access them from someone else's account in MathLAN and also somewhere else on campus.
• Any ideas you take from elsewhere should be properly cited. Any help you receive from someone else should be properly cited. (A link to the appropriate place on a citations or acknowledgements page is one nice way to do such citations.)

Suggested Improvements

• Use both textual and numeric data.
• Use some of the unpredictable sentence generation ideas from the reading on random values and simulation.
• Change formatting depending on the user preferences (or on a randomly selected value).

Turning It In

Send me the URL of your site's Front Door. It is likely that I will include links to your site somewhere in the course web, so it will be accessible everywhere. (We can also see how long it takes to get indexed by search engines. :-)