The DX-Mars Project

What is it? Why use it? Requirements Screenshots Resources Contact

DX-Mars is designed to replace the trivial and tedious console I/O programming assignments that are currently so prevalent in early CS courses. These simple and boring text-based assignments can become frustrating causing students to lose interest quickly, often in computer science as a whole. The goal of DX-Mars is to show the power and relevance of computer science in general, by providing a fun and significant domain in which students can work.

• It’s an interesting and graphical domain. In the end, the students come out with something they can show to others and say, “Hey, look what I can do.” In addition, the graphical nature of the project allows for useful debugging and conceptualizing features to be built in.

• DX-Mars is easily extensible. It is built on an even more general game engine, the DXFramework. This allows modifications to be made with minimal changes to the code. Further, the specific domain of a Mars-rover can be extended to multiple classic computer science problems and data structures.

§ The knapsack problem. (sorting) The rover collects rock and fossil samples, with varying values, and must pack them into its inventory.

§ The traveling salesman problem. (tree traversal algorithms) The rover is given a set of coordinates by a reconnaissance satellite, and must visit them all efficiently.

§ A* pathing. Simply add costs to the tiles for a suitable A* domain.

§ Binary space partition trees. (tree generation) Adding a 3-D view of the world, BSPs can be used for rendering sections of the map.

• DX-Mars is a large-scale object-oriented project. This will give students valuable experience working inside a large and sometimes complex project where they must learn both the strengths and limitations of that system. In the real world, software engineers rarely start from scratch, and often must work with huge existing systems. They typically don’t have time to learn the entire system – they must decide what is important and focus on those areas. DX-Mars gives students experience here as well.

• DX-Mars is heavily object-oriented, and demonstrates the benefits of good OO design.

• DX-Mars is given as a Microsoft Visual Studio solution. This gives the students experience working with a popular and powerful SDK. They will learn the basics of project settings, compiling, and debugging. Knowing Visual Studio is another valuable skill for real world applications.