Student Programming Projects

[D. Tweed]

> > Next Semester, I am supposed to teach a short course in Haskell.
> > Can anyone recommend interesting programming projects which can
> > be completed in about a month? Thank you very much.

This doesn't come from direct experience and you don't specify what the
students will already know, whether they're all `good' programmers,etc
but...

Maybe some sort of simulation/control type problem, something like say
managing a supply depot under requests for products from ultimate
consumers and issuing requests for more stock from the ultimate
manufacturers (which may be filled unreliably.) The key reason for
suggesting this is it avoids being so mathematical that computer science
students who dislike maths will be turned off (at least as much :-) ), it
has a natural usage of infinite lists (consumer demand, manufacturer
responses) and has lots of opportunities for smart-alecks to show
off whilst not being impossible for a weaker student to complete usefully
(and in an extreme case you could write an overall framework into which
really weak students can write components to be plugged in, thus allowing
them to demonstrate some `micro' grasp of haskell when the haven't got a
macro grasp.)

(The weaker students bit is more from a belief that a 40% student should
be able to get a 40% mark on some coursework, rather than it being
impossible to get less than about 80% because the project leads to
programs which either work almost perfectly or not at all. I'm not
suggesting making it ridiculously easy.)


___cheers,_dave________________________________________________________
www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~tweed/pi.htm |tweed's law:  however many computers
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