Module 3 Instructions

Week (module) 3: Putting Data on a Map

Read this document for other places where it says NOTE FOR LEARNERS WORKING

OFFLINE to understand what other resources you will need to download.

This assignment builds on the assignment from last week. What you have to do is detailed below.

Once again, you will not submit your code for grading. Rather, after you have completed all

parts of this assignment you will take an end-of-module quiz. And like last week, you'll learn the

most through doing the coding, not simply taking the quiz, so that's where you should put your

energy.

Introduction

Data visualization is a powerful technique for spotting trends. In this programming assignment,

you will write a program that helps visualize earthquake data. Earthquakes are happening daily

around the world. Geological analysis suggests which locations will be prone to higher seismic

activity. You will plot recent earthquakes on a map to highlight potential disaster zones.

As you work on this project, keep in mind that most of your code will work equally well with

any other geotagged data: from disease outbreaks to airplane crashes to discoveries of resource-

rich mines, and beyond!

Your map will read earthquake data from a live RSS feed (an online source of frequently updated

data, see Wikipedia entry for details):

expect you to work with online documentation in this module. You can download some of this

documentation to use offline. There is a note below about what you will need.

As you saw (or will see) in the videos from this module, we’ll organize our data into features and

markers. A feature is a class of objects which stores one or more locations, its type, and any

additional data properties associated with it. In our case, we will need a List of features which

store the location of each earthquake in the past week, and additional properties associated with

it (magnitude, age, elevation, title).

To display the features, you will use markers. A marker is a class of objects that give us a visual

representation of a feature, which at the simplest level is a dot at the corresponding latitude. A

marker does not, however, have to be associated with a feature as all we need is a location to

programming assignments.

IF YOU ARE WORKING OFFLINE, you can download these documentation pages when you

have an internet connection.

What you will do

Just like before, we provide some skeleton code to get you started. To complete this assignment,

do each of the following steps:

1. Open the starter file for this assignment: In the eclipse Package Explorer, expand the

module3 package. You should see the file EarthquakeCityMap.java. Double click on that file to

open it. Again, don’t peek ahead at the rest of the packages. There is a file with the same

name in the future module packages. Make sure you open the one in the module3 package.

NOTE TO LEARNERS WORKING OFFLINE: You will once again have to set the value of

the variable offline to true so that the code uses the local map tiles and local earthquake data.

Your map will look slightly different than the one above.

3. Add code to display a marker at the location of each earthquake in the RSS feed. After this

step, your program should look like the following:

Hints for step 3

• In the setup method, you should create a SimplePointMarker object for each PointFeature

in the list features, inside the setup method. You will need to add a loop where the

comments indicate to do so. Inside the loop you will call the method createMarker to

create a new SimplePointMarker for each PointFeature in the List earthquakes. Then you

will add each new SimplePointMarker to the markers List.

• Do not call the draw method on the markers. That method will be called automatically

for you when you add the markers to the map. As long as you have added the

4. Add code to the createMarker method to style each marker according to the magnitude of

its earthquake. You can be creative here, but as a minimum you should have the size and color

change for at least 3 different levels of earthquake. For example,

• Minor earthquakes (less than magnitude 4.0) will have blue markers and be small.

• Light earthquakes (between 4.0-4.9) will have yellow markers and be medium size.

• Moderate and higher earthquakes (5.0 and over) will have red markers and be largest.

You can find out more about earthquake classification here:

http://www.geo.mtu.edu/UPSeis/magnitude.html

And remember you can pan and zoom to explore the map.

Hints for step 4

• You’ll likely find the UnfoldingMaps javadoc helpful. We recommend you look at the

Marker interface. For reasons we will learn next week, all of the Marker methods can be

called on SimplePointMarker objects.

• One method you’ll likely find particularly helpful is the setColor method. This takes an

int in “Procesing format”. To generate the int in the correct format, use the “color”

method in the PApplet class. It takes 3 int arguments: red, green and blue and returns an

int in the correct form to pass into setColor. e.g. int myColor = color(100, 120, 200);

• There is code in the starter file that demonstrates how to get properties out of each

earthquake feature, as well as how to use the color method mentioned above. In addition,

and add the corresponding text next to it. Implement this in the addKey method which will be

called from the draw method.

Hints for step 5:

• For this part you will find the Processing graphics methods useful. You can find the

reference here: https://www.processing.org/reference/ In particular the methods: text(),

rect(), ellipse(), and fill() will come in handy, but you can (and should) also feel free to

explore and use any other method you think would be useful. We also encourage you to

make your key prettier than ours!

• When drawing text, use the fill method to set the color of the text. You can also play

around with fonts and alignment, as is shown in some of the examples on the Processing

references:https://www.processing.org/reference/text_.html and

https://www.processing.org/reference/textAlign_.html

find here: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/feed/v1.0/atom.php . You just need to change

the earthquake URL in your code to point to the feed you are interested in. Or if you have an idea