Reflection

Reflection

Our organisation was reasonably good, we started early on tackling the main ideas for our website and Thijs began writing code early on. Because of this, we easily finished chapter 1 (which was our code) on time. Doing the code first was a smart idea, as it gave us referencing points for the information we put in the website later on. For example, we could understand the difference between the different order types. As the deadline to hand in the first version of our website came closer, Nills started working on the information and theory for the website, while Thijs worked on the proofs. Nills could have started a bit sooner (fall break), but in the end almost everything was finished and explained. The week before the deadline, we started implementing our information into the website, within a few days this was fully finished and it gave us enough time to check everything. We set the deadline to finish putting all the information in the website on the 20th of December 2021, giving us two days to check. This deadline was really helpful, as we found many small mistakes throughout the website. Overall, everything got finished on time, Nills could have started working sooner on the basic information (in the end it wasn’t an issue) and Thijs worked well throughout the timespan of the project. Our communication was excellent as well, if either of us needed the others assistance, we came to help almost instantly. In addition, if either of us wanted the other to do something, we did it without questioning or resisting. We could easily communicate our ideas to each other and spending two nights at Nills’ place gave us lots of valuable time discussing what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it. This was also the case at school and if we had questions about our website, we did not have a problem asking our supervisor John Val for help.

We ultimately decided on doing this project because we were both interested in doing something with code. The topic Magic Hypercubes was one of many possible options, however, it was more interesting to us, as we were unable to find a magic hypercube generator anywhere, making our website unique in nature. Additionally, the fact that there were so many variations on the magic square was definitely a reason to do our final project about magic hypercubes. This is because we had no idea all these variations existed and the ideas behind them were all quite interesting. We can both agree that we enjoyed working on the project, and although some things were less enjoyable (creating endless tables, or copy pasting our information from our document to the website), we can both agree it was worth our time. We have been working on the project for around 6 to 7 months and we both are happy with our finished product.

The objective of the website was to introduce students to the world of magic hypercubes. We did this by using many images, colors and making the website easy to navigate. In addition, we wanted people to be able to toy around with the generated magic hypercubes, allowing them to move around with them and have clear visualisation of how the magic hypercube works. In addition, having a magic hypercube checker, allows people to test their new found knowledge about the algorithms for constructing p-dimensional magic hypercubes, which is also engaging. We believe that the most important information about magic hypercubes and their constructing algorithms are in our website, making it the perfect foundation for people to learn about.

If we had more time, we would have liked to include lessons and exercises into the website. Through this we could really test the skills of people visiting the website and we could see if they understood our information. Unfortunately, we could not implement this, as it is almost a whole other final project of work in itself. We would also have liked to be able to visualise a magic tesseract, however, plotting points for the generation of this four-dimensional magic hypercube proved to be really difficult. It would have allowed even clearer visualisation of what we were trying to bring across and it would have been quite fun to play around with. An additional feature which might have been interesting to add, is to show in the website our code and make questions and exercises about the code like in the website of John Val (johnval.nl). However, we definitely are happy we chose to make the generators, as they add a great deal of depth to our information and visualisation. In addition, information and proof about the algorithms was an important part of our project, which we are glad we put in. Of course, the icons for all the different types of magic squares and shapes added a play aspect to the website, which we appreciate a lot now.

For a future project we would like to improve the overall looks of the website even more. The website in itself is not a very formal looking website (it was also meant for students) and we would have really enjoyed making it look more professional. In addition, we would want to do even more research into the subject matter, instead of staying at the surface level of information in some cases (not the proofs). We would enjoy making a separate in depth guide into specific parts of magic hypercubes, for example, just the magic square or cube. We could get more information from books (we used some information from books (pdf files)), instead of leaning more towards the use of websites. This would be interesting, because websites contain elements of the books and the books contain the theory behind these elements. Nills, would also like to start sooner working on the project, as he now had to work long hours for days on end to finish the project. He did not mind working these hours, but he still prefers avoiding doing so much work in one day.

Overall, the project was a success. Our communication was good with each other and our supervisor, we completed our deadlines. We finished everything we wanted to add into the website and added small details along the way. There are some things that could be improved and some things we would like to keep the same.