Memorable Programming Assignments?

Albert Schueller asks: "This fall I'll teach introductory programming for the third time. The class is generally populated by students from a wide range of backgrounds and interests-liberal arts and science types. While we use C++, the language isn't really the issue. Rather, the goal is to introduce basic programming ideas like loops, logic, modular programming etc. What are some of your favorite programming assignments that would be appropriate for students at this level?"

Comments

Ah, 15-127

[nadador]

(Oh, to be a freshman again. To take a "programming" class. To never have heard things like "this implementation is O of log n" or "NP complete" or "software cost estimation" or "preemptive fixed priority scheduling"...)

The only assignment I remember from my first programming class was one in which we read in stuff from a file into a linked list, printed it forwards and then printed it backwards. The abstraction of the linked list was so cool, and when it actually worked I felt like king of the nerds (little did I know the horrors to come).

When I was at CMU, there was one intro to programming class, and it was no fun for anyone. Now they've broken it up into people-who-might-take-another-CS-class, and people-who-don't-like-smelling-like-the-cluster, hence a class that is very light on fun and heavy on syntax and object oriented garbage, and one light on programming and heavy on pointy clicky fill in the blanks and make a game happiness.

stepping onto my soapbox:

While we're talking about intro classes, I think everyone who is going to take any additional classes in computer science, especially in the systems area, should take their first class in C, and it should be no fun. Every now and then you can toss them something fun, but learning the discipline of malloc/free, strncmp, etc., will serve you so well when you get to do object-y type computer science stuff. Writing good code, in a scientific or engineering sense, is just like learning to use UNIX - if you didn't suffer, you didn't learn. And if you get to new/delete or just new and then forget about it, you never learn the discipline that writing good code demands.

-- steps off soapbox.