I'm going to introduce the Grade Manager project. In this screen cast, I'm going to go over all about it. The Grade Manager project is by far the most challenging project in this course, and it's a quite a bit harder than the other option, the Monte Carlo simulation. I wanted to have a pretty complicated project up here, for those of you who want to kind of go above and beyond, or perhaps if you finish the course, and you want to come back and learn some more challenging things, you can always come back to this project. So, is the Grade Manager project for you? There's a couple of things that you might want to consider. Do you have patience and perseverance? It's going to take you a little bit more time than some of the other projects. I do give quite a bit of details, but there's a lot of things that you're going to kind of have to connect the dots with. Do you do well with avoiding frustration or I guess not avoiding frustration, but do you do well with frustration? Can you work by yourself? Can you operate with little supervision? It's difficult with these massive online open courses, because a lot of times you can't really get the one on one help that you need particularly with these project courses. Each project, there's some common themes with everybody's projects, but there are some things that are just more individualized so, a little bit harder to troubleshoot. Are you good with coming up with creative solutions? So you're going to have to come up with some creativity and link the different dots in this project on your own. And again, this is the most difficult project of the course so if you if you like a challenge, if you are not in a hurry to get this course over with, or later on if you want to come back and revisit this project, it's a pretty good one and it's pretty challenging yet there's a lot of things that you can do with this project in the real world, and I think a lot you are going to find things in your careers or future careers that would be very similar to what I do with this project. Let me show you what it's going to look like. This is my finalized project, more or less. You're going to provide a file that starts as a set up file so this is actually a grade manager set up. So the first time an instructor or a teacher uses this file, it's going to look like this and they're going to go to the start page here, they're going to click on set up new class, please enter the name of the course, so I might put in something like a curl number, I'll click OK, it's going to ask, please choose the directory or the folder where you'd like to place the new folder. A folder named CHEN1310 will be created in this directory. So I go ahead and navigate. I'm just going to put this on the desktop for now, so I'm going to put it there, and it says new folder has been created on the desktop. Next it's going to tell us that this file has been saved, Grade Manager CHEN1310.xlsm in the folder CHEN1310. And if I want, I can navigate to the desktop, and over down here on the left, I've got that folder. Next it's going to ask us to navigate to the initial class roster. This file must have student names in column A (Last name, First name) Student ID numbers in column B, and section number in column C. So I've navigated to the roster file, and I'm going to go ahead and open that. What it just did, was it imported the students in that roster file to the spreadsheet down here to the roster tab, and now, it comes up with a box. This is a user form, that you will be creating. Select the number of homework assignments, so the user maybe have five homework assignments, six exams and eight lab assignments, and then we're going to initialize spreadsheets. When I set up the roster, the roster has all the section numbers on it, and I'll show you the roster here in a minute. The file will separate the roster into different sub files or individual files corresponding to those section numbers in all. Again, I'll show you this here in a minute. And then adds the assignment headings that I just chose here, I chose five homework assignments, six exams and eight labs and it's added that's to all of the files. So this program opened up all of the files, the section files and added these assignments to it, and I can click OK, and here's our roster. Again, the roster file looks exactly like this. We've got five sections, I have sections 101 through 105. When I run that, let me open up my folder here, so, what it did was it created another folder, section, grade sheets, and for each of the sections again,101 through 105, it plucked out only those students when I initialized this and it put those students into these section files. So, if I open up section 103, we see that only the students that are in section 103 are on this spreadsheet. Furthermore, we plucked out the student ID, and I've initialized the top row with the assignments that I selected from that initial drop down menu. I had five homework assignments, I think six exams, that's a lot of exams, probably only two or three in a normal course and eight lab assignments. So that's what that initialization process will do. And if I opened up the other section files, we would see similar things where we've only got the students that are in that section. Now this is really cool, I'll show you this and some of the screen cast related to this project, but up here, you can add an icon, so I've added this icon here for the Grade Manager project. I don't have a button like I normally do so I've got this icon up here and I'm going to press the Grade Manager project, and it opens up the user form, what would you like to do? Sync the grade book, we can search and replace grades, we can add a column, we can delete a column, we can back up the file, or we can quit. So, all of these things should be in your Grade Manager project. If you want to sync the grade book, how this works, is the TS for the class, and I know you guys aren't instructors or teachers, maybe some you are, but maybe you have different co-workers doing different things, and you might each be working with separate files, and you might actually have them on something like Drop box. I have a drop box down here that I can share these with my TS. And periodically, I'm going to get these updated files and I'm going to want to sync so I can sync the grade book. I don't have any grades in there yet, but if I did the sync grade book, it would bring in all of those files and the grades on those assignments into the main roster file so I could always kind of have an idea of how all the students are doing. You can also search and replace grades, so again right now I don't have any grades in here, but you can select the student, so I can search through for a student, I could select a category, again there are no categories yet, but I can replace grades, I can search to see what a student got on a grade then obviously I can quit. If I go up here and open it again, we can add columns. When you add a column, I could add one more lab assignment and when you click that, I'll do that, it's opening up all five of those grade sheets and adding a 9th lab onto that, and then indicates that we've added a 9th lab. I can also delete a column from the grade book, maybe I decide that I want to get rid of an assignment, and I can always back up the file. For example, if I click that file right now, it just creates a backup file, and if I open up the main folder here, you see that we have a backup file with today's date on there. So this is a pretty challenging project. I would encourage some of you to try to tackle this. Again, it's going to require a lot of independent work. You're not going to get a whole lot of help from me because each of these projects is going to be so individualized once you get working on it, but I will try to help as best I can, but you're going to be mostly relying on yourself for this project and you're going to be using a lot of debugging tools using F8, some of the tools I showed in part 1 of the course but once you get this thing working it's really awesome. It's a really fulfilling feeling to have it all working, so it's a big challenge but it's a big reward. So, I hope some of you will choose to tackle this. Good luck.
