#### How satisfied are you with Project3? What grade would you give yourself?

I am very satisfied with project 3. Though we initially had much grander plans of implementing some type of game based heavily on physical simulation, I am pleased that we were able to implement all the solvers we did as well as extra features like adaptive step sizing and collision detection. It was incredibly satisfying to see the piece of cloth fall on a sphere/cube and behave in a mostly realistic fashion in realtime.

I also felt that we wrote good, clean generic solvers, which will be a boon to us in the future as they will be easily adaptible to future projects.

I would give myself an A on project 3.

#### What went right with your Project 3?

Separating out the work in the beginning was a good idea. Mohamed and I were able to focus on writing code in parallel, but because we discussed the interfaces we would use in advance, combining our code was easy.

Later on we were able to work well together doing pair programming for implementing the collision detection. The collision detection was finished surprisingly quickly this way.

#### What could have been better with your project 3?

Planning was, in general, very poor. As is typical among students, we began with grand visions of the project and put off work until near the end of the project at which point we frantically worked to get everything implemented and debugged.

#### What advice would you give to someone doing your project next year?

First, I do think that this was an appropriate topic. It provided an interesting look in to a numerical problem with real applications and satisfying results when the project was complete. The work load of our finished project was also about right. I feel it was enough work to warrant a 3 week project, but not enough to stress or overwork us.

Next, I would advise pair programming over coding separately as much as possible. This can be difficult due to differences in schedules and work habits, but tends to be quite rewarding. As a specific example, I tend to go out of my way to try to write clean, reusable, readable code -- to the point that I lose focus of actually implementing the objective. Mohamed tends to be the exact opposite. In pair programming we were able to find a good balance between the two. Additionally, we were able to point out bugs and issues that the other person did not even think of while coding. The fact that it took us almost two weeks (mostly due to poor planning, admittedly) to implement the numerical solvers, but implemented collision detection in approximately 2 hours is atleast partially a testament to the usefulness of pair programming.

#### What did you learn from your project?

First, I learned the difficulty of dealing with parameters that have little physical meaning to you. Trying to balance the spring constants, damping coefficients, and time steps to achieve good results with no intuitive understanding of exactly how they will effect the simulation was difficult. However, in doing so, I now have some sense of how those parameters effect the result.

Second, I was able to learn first hand what the tradeoffs are in choosing a numerical ODE solver in terms of speed, accuracy, and complexity.

### How do you think you did with the other class projects (1 and 2)?

I think I did an excellent job on the first project. I was able to set a goal, and achieve exactly what I set out to do, without any real compromise. 

I feel my performance on the second project was worse. Partially, I think, I lost interest with the second project. I do think I was able to achieve a decent, working tool for the purpose I intended, though.

#### How do you think you did with the other aspects of the class?

I would give myself an A on the assignments. I feel that I put a good deal of effort in to them and was pleased with the results.

I would give myself a B on the summaries. I read all of the papers, and was able to provide a summary of the text and ideas of the paper, but I don't think I often took the extra step in thinking about how to apply the papers looking for strengths and weaknesses and how I may incorporate them in to my own interests, though I did try.

I would give myself an AB for class participation. I was never unprepared for a class, and always paid attention. I tried to contribute my ideas to the discussion a few times each class period, but feel that I could have been more active in this regard.