Ideas for High School Computer Projects? 633
rcmpcbf asks: "HELP A TEACHER OUT! My Computer Science students often get bored doing stuff that the AP Curriculum or School Board asks us to teach. I would really appreciate the input of Slashdot members on interesting Computer Science projects for high school students. You would be helping other students, just like yourselves, not me." What kinds of computer projects do you feel would be stimulating for the high school age group?
So what if they're bored? (Score:2)
However, if you want to teach them about the same structures and algorithms, but with more interesting projects, try real world things. One project I did in my AP class (in '88), was working with word processing files. We would read in the files and do things like count words and lines, spell check, and things like that. In other words, some of the stuff an actual word processor would do. In college, I really enjoyed learning about image processing. The main problem with graphics, though, is that you have to tie the class to a specific platform, which bites.
Maybe you could teach some of the concepts and relate them to networking, since the internet is such a big thing these days. I would have loved to do stuff like that in high school.
-D
"Fastest" Program Contest (Score:2)
And one I thought of just the other day which bit me on a trading system - write a program to convert decimals to fractions...the key there is Euclid's Algorithm, I believe...
And over the course of the project drop little hints pointing the students toward these old formulas and hypothesis, don't just give it all away
Whoever's got the best one in the class gets an extra A or something who knows...these are great for not only programming but critical thinking and scientifically/mathematically thinking...we were coding in GW-Basic...I think some of these concepts are lost in the days of VB where UI's are often the focus of projects
Choose a topic you know (Score:2)
That said, encourage the students to do something in an area where you have some expertise. If the students want to make a search engine but you know nothing about searches and NLP, their project will probably fail. Encourage teamwork -- too many of my college assignments and projects are individual efforts.
And here's an obligatory list of ideas, grouped by area:
AI. Stick to "easy" problems in search and scheduling. Maybe something like a course scheduler to plan times for course sections. Simulations and games are good too.
Theory. Challenge them to write a program that prints its own source code as output. Implement an interpreter for a simple language like LOGO or basic.
Systems. Write your malloc/free (or new/delete) or a garbage collector. Design an instant messenger protocol or chat system.
Graphics. Show them the basics of OpenGL and set them loose. Have them do some basic image filtering stuff ala Photoshop.
Again, it helps to steer the students to an area which you know so you can support them. I'm too lazy to register...
Re:No Class has actually completed the project (Score:3)
*DUCK*
Re:A couple ideas (Score:3)
As a slightly more complicated to implement chaotic system, simulating a rocket in the vicinity of Earth is also good. This is more complicated because of the need to take the earth's atmosphere into account. Very good for generating interest in aerodynamics.
BTW, I've done both (from a book, "Programming for Scientists and Engineers" iirc). I learnt a lot from that book, including just how a cross product and works :)
I wholeheartedly agree! (Score:2)
How do I know? I moved too fast for my instructor. I learned everything he had to teach me in a matter of weeks. So he asked me if there was any project I wanted to work on. I told him and he agreed. The assistant principal came to the class one day and happened to notice first that I was using the expensive laser printer instead of the cheap dot matrix printers (needed to so I could read the result - had permission) and then saw me go straight from reading the printout with a highlighter pen to change three lines of code and start testing out this game ...
I was pulled out of class right then and spent the next forty minutes listening to this dumbass yell at me how I was going to fail the class, be suspended for a week, etc, etc, etc.. After that point, the instructor just happened to overhear the shouting walking down the hall on his way to lunch... It was all resolved by the week, but I wasn't allowed to work on the game again until next monday. I hear the AP got an earfull from the instructor for screwing with his students without talking to him first.
So what did I learn, besides that administration people suck? Arrays, sorting, pointers, linked lists, text processing, simple 2D graphics, 286 macro assembly, high-speed serial port communications, program overlays and later protected mode programming in DOS, the basics of DLLs, and a little OOP. Did I mention this was first semester Intro to Programming class?
Give them something they enjoy working on and watch their productivity soar. I did all of this on a 16MHz 386. What could someone learn with a Pentium, a 3D card, and an API like SDL which takes the OS-specifics out of video, networking, sound, input management, and window handling? They'd learn how to code, that's for damned sure!
Simple Directmedia Layer (Score:2)
LGPL'd multi-platform framebuffer, OpenGL, window housekeeping, input, sound, networking, and multithreading. Embeds nicely as a static library optimized to include exactly what you need and no more instead of a big shared lib.
Build a rope computer (Score:2)
You're getting too deep :) (Score:2)
For example, most digital IC-based circuits use a +5V DC value for a logical "1". The reason why a "1" is +5V DC has to do with the contruction of the transistors used to build the gates. It's sufficient to state something like "transistors can be used as switches, and they switch between 0V and +5 V because of the way they are made" without having to get into the guts of semiconductor theory.
Similarly, one could present a diagram of a 2-bit adder circuit made of logic gates, and demonstrate that it really does add 2 2-bit numbers, even following the states of the gates inside the circuit, without showing the Karnough map that led to the circuit's design.
I envision the hands-on portion of the class using slightly more complex chips than raw logic gates. Shift registers, ALUs, small static RAM chips, and the like can be wired together fairly easily and do fun things without having to get into the undergrad stuff.
But even so, exposing kids to difficult concepts and forcing them to THINK is not a bad thing at all. School should be challenging! I'd rather see kids struggle with difficult material than have them bored with pablum.
Basic Hardware Projects (Score:5)
A lot - and I mean A LOT - of basic understanding of "why computers are built the way they are" comes from wiring up really basic componants, flipping some switches, and watching LEDs flash on and off.
For instance, I remember doing a project where I wired up 2 shift registers and an ALU chip to a rack of switches and 8 LEDs. By flipping the switches, one could input a pair of binary numbers into the shift registers, and then another switch (wired up as the clock) would trigger the ALU, and the resultant sum would show up on the LEDs.
After doing something like this, you gain understanding of such things as: Why do computers work in binary? How do instruction sets work? How do data busses work? What is the signifigance of the clock? And so on.
The only downside to projects like this is that you need some hardware - breadboards, power supplies, a selection of cheap ICs, a bunch of wire, and LEDs. But tinkering with this crap is just soooooo worth it - and it's fun!
Re: Build a rope computer...or model a computer... (Score:2)
When I started on my computer science degree, the first project in computer science I was to write a series of functions to do basic mathematical calculations. The catch was that we couldn't use any math operators or external math functions, except for two simple functions, one of which added one to a number, the other of which subtracted one from a number. On those building blocks, we had to implement (IIRC) addition, subtraction, multiplication, integer division, modulo division, greatest common denominator, least common multiple, and integer exponentiation. These had to return correct values for all positive integers.
This would probably be a decent project for high school students. If the class is advanced, the parameters can be expanded. Ensure that the functions work for negative integers, too. (Not too hard, and I remember taking this step with my project just to make it slightly more interesting.) Add other mathematical functions, such as factorials or integer roots (square roots of square numbers, etc.). Add, perhaps as an additional project, the requirement of creating a rudimentary calculator with functions. There's a good bit of room for expansion; it depends on how good the students are.
--Phil (I can't remember most of the other projects I did in those classes--they weren't as interesting, I suppose.)
Emulate a Machine (Score:2)
Depending on how advanced your students are, they could write a rudimentary machine code emulator. I remember writing one of these for one of my computer science courses, and it was quite interesting (to me, at least). We were given a list of opcodes and a description of what each was to do. Our program had to assemble them, creating a file with the binary output, and then run the file.
IIRC, it was a simple assembly language. Each opcode was an int long, as were the opcode's parameters (although some parameters were floats). Space was always reserverd for two parameters, whether they were needed or not (this allowed jumps to specify the number of instructions over which to jump--there were no symbolic labels). IIRC, the main opcodes were mathematical ones. There were also load and save for memory addresses, but the addresses were always immediate--no indirect references. There were two registers.
I beleve the opcodes included
- add registers A and B, put result in A
- subtract A - B, result in A
- multiply
- divide (all numbers were floats)
- load from memory address to register (There was a space of about 16 floats for memory. memory locations were for sequential numbers--the intent was to implement memory locations as subscripts on an array of floats.)
- save to memory address from register
- put literal number in register
- jump N instructions if specified register is zero
- end program, final result (to be reported by the interpreting program) in register A
Those are all I remember. There may have been others, but those are enough to write simple mathematical test programs.This may be a bit advanced for a high school class, but it was certainly an interesting project for me. If the students can handle it, I suspect that they will like it, too.
--Phil (The fun thing is that I'm pretty sure that I did this project before I took assembly.)
good, basic, computer science (Score:3)
By the time I hit data structures in college, it was a breeze- I had already learned the stuff a couple years back. The best advice I can give is to nail all of those topics before doing any projects. It was fairly interesting, but I didn't realize the full benefit of the stuff until much later.
Re:One thing that would be good (Score:2)
I think the best idea is to let them come up with something on their own. Throw out a few proto ideas and let them run with it. Let the kids with the best ideas play project lead.
And if you want a pro programer to play mentor I'm sure a number of us here on
Most importatly make it fun.
The Cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
One thing that would be good (Score:4)
But also the writting a functional specification on their own is a very good expierience for anyone going into any form of technical field.
Ofcourse you can then assign them something more complex and interesting.
The Cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Bot wars (Score:2)
Some ideas (Score:2)
Procedural Thinking is good (Score:2)
The hard part about programming is thinking in a sufficiently formal manner in order to carefully plan and execute a design project (like a database backed web site).
Learning SQL is a great way to start. It's fairly simple, applicable to a lot of programs (Oracle, Sybase, MS-SQL Server), and is good at teaching somebody how to think formally.
Build a database backed web service (something that would do the school good would be great, but not neccessary), maybe a school calendar. The hard parts are handled by the database program and the web server -- the fun parts can be built in modules.
Break the class into groups, and have them work on individual modules -- what data must go in, what must come out, and how it should be formatted. Then, the groups work together so the modules can talk to each other (this teaches some basic OOP-thinking as well). Then, start building. You can divide the semester into three chunks:
Why rewrite? Well, it's not bad practice to assume that the first go-around will be thrown away as you learn new things after the first build -- you can make up for those mistakes in the rewrite.
I sure do wish something like that was available to me in HS. SQL is easier than basic, and much more useful in teaching concepts.
Project ideas (Score:2)
Something alittle less adventerous might be writing a client-server app that accepts math formulas and then spools the result back out in a nice 2d/3d graph. Maybe use gnuplot as a backend? That would show that you know networking, advanced math, etc. For bonus points, write both a linux and a windows app to show you know cross-platform stuff. You could use this outside of highschool too - demonstrate it to prospective employers! :)
Okay, moving down towards simpler stuff, how about writing a program that takes all the bus routes in your area and you provide which destinations you want to go that day, and it spits out a route for you. Be sure the routes aren't hardcoded. This is the infamous "Travelling Salesman" problem in CSci. This was done way back in the 70's on the PDP-5 by a few hackers for the subway system in NY. Read Steven Levy's "Hackers - Heroes of the computer revolution" for additional historical information
Hmm.. Another idea might be to write a simple webserver. Or a chat client/server like IRC.
That should get you started.. Cheers!
Seniors (Score:2)
Have them write a simple ray tracer! Some of those kids will be thinking "why do I need to learn trig?" You can show them that they can do fun things with it, and that's a good a reason as any.
Conrad's Game of Life (Score:2)
What students in Nome, Alaska used to do... (Score:5)
High school students in Nome were given an awesome project by their high school CS teacher -- we wrote the program that was used to keep track of the mushers during the race.
This was pre-internet explosion -- I'm talking mid- to late 80's here -- and we wrote the program in BASIC on our trusty Apple IIe's. It was a simple database; the users would enter a musher number, checkpoint number, time entering or leaving, and number of active dogs on the team. Once an hour we had to print off a report that was given out to the media reps sitting in Nome.
The ultimate perk was, once the race actually started, students could sign up for 8-hour shifts manning the computers at the Iditarod HQ in Nome. (Yes, even during school hours, but you had to sign up for 2 non-school shifts for every one school shift.)
About the time I graduated from school, Alascom (Alaska's big telephone corp) was using the data from our program to do the updates on their 800-number voice-messaging number. ("The current leader is Libby Riddles; her last checkpoint was in Ruby" and all that.)
Granted, we re-wrote the program from scratch every year -- not the best model if you want to teach code re-use and modularity (but then again, it was the mid- to late 80's). I suppose it's likely that, should a class totally screw off for the semester, that they'd pull an old copy off of the shelf to use. But it was a project that stimulated the creative drive of the students. Even the ones who weren't in the class; kids also helped out with feeding and caring for the dogs when they got into town. It was a real community effort.
I suspect that, since the Iditarod has become more "professional" a la the Olypmics, that this project isn't being done anymore. It's a pity.
Jay (=
How about have them make a parallel port DAC? (Score:2)
The sound quality you can get is surprisingly good. I used mine for playing Star Control II (There's a command line switch for parallel port DAC support, I forget what it is). If this is a more programming related class, perhaps you can then have them write a few little programs that use the device.
File Transfer Program (Score:2)
It has to use TCP/IP, and it has to be easily portable to multiple OSes.
Wish list features to include download resuming, searching the host for certain file names, a GUI, chat while downloading, and et cetera.
If the program ever happens to make it into widespread use, I'd like to see the RIAA try to sue a bunch of high school kids over their school project.
LK
Re:Columbine (Score:2)
A couple of suggestions: (Score:2)
I get warm fuzzies when I see educators at the high-school level trying to make classes interesting and relevent to students in an immediate sense, as opposed to merely informative. Good luck!
AP computer science (Score:3)
So that year, the AP CompSci test was just ridiculously easy. My entire class got 5's on it (the highest possible score) and a lot of them hadn't used a computer before in their life and couldn't do a lot of the assignments.
For good assignment choices, I would look at some of those programming contests that are all over the web, and definately give the kids the option of coming up with their own project if they have a good idea for one. I asked my teacher if I could skip the regular assignments because I already knew C++ and work on a program that would play Connect 4 against a human instead, and I had a great time of it and came up with a cool program.
"What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is"
More information... (Score:2)
1) How much time can you spare to commit to this?
2) What is the experience level of the students? (I know the AP CS stuff used to be in Pascal, what is it now?)
3) What resources are available to you? For example, can you get a computer to run Linux on as a server or anything like that?
Ultimately those three questions are going to limit what you can reasonably accomplish.
---
Computers and Amateur Radio (Score:2)
Look at college curricula (Score:2)
If college freshmen can understand it in a semester, HS students can get it in a year, esp. if they're taking an AP CS class anyway. Check out the TA's wepbage (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~davin/), which used to have the list of class projects, but still has useful information, including sample exams. As the fall semester progresses, he'll be posting information for his own class that you can take a look at for ideas.
Alternately, LOGO is a good language to learn. Before I get yelled at here, it's not practical to use but it's an excellent language to learn because of the way it's structured. It's simple, easy to debug, and will run on just about anything. There are versions that will run on an old Apple ][, a 386, or whatever. My personal favorite is MSWLogo (http://www.softronix.com/logo.html), by George Mills of UC-Berkeley, using the UCBLogo core developed by Brian Harvey. Yes, it's a windows program, but it's excellently done, and incredibly full-featured, and has only crashed on me about 3 times in as many years. It's got a primitive (now--it's under constant development by George Mills' graduate students and was just updated in the last version, 2 weeks ago) GUI toolkit, 3D support (check out the demos!), sound, commands to control serial and parallel ports, open files, read from the game port, etc. The language is interpreted (though compilers exist if you really want one--this defeats the purpose though), but within the constraints of an arbitrarily-sized 'page', your students can do literally anything they want.
I agree with other posters who have said that you should have your students work on their own design documents before they begin coding--this is incredibly helpful, esp. on large projects, or those they'll only be working on in class.
Top Ten Things To Teach Your Computer Class (Score:5)
9. Show them the proper methods of beard grooming
8. How to dress appropriately for any occassion with only jeans and a t-shirt.
7. Teach them to drink coffee - lots of it.
6. It's never too early to turn them on to cigarettes.
5. Give them a web connection to
4. Get them turned on to Linux and teach them to make inane comments about how much KDE sucks if they like Gnome, and vise versa.
3. Make sure they never get to bed before midnight and make them get up at some ungodly hour.
2. Give all of them pagers and call them every few hours in the middle of the night and say "My computer has a message on it that says 'Press any key to continue.' What do I do now?"
1. Teach them how to be a BOFH!
Re:An idea.... (Score:2)
According to game theory, random choices is the optimal strategy. The best you can do against a random choice strategy is to draw. In the short term, you may win due to statistical fluctuations but in the long term you will draw.
Reason why random bots lose the contest is that there are other bots in the contest that play strategies like always playing stone. Random bots don't take advantage of this and so lose points to bots who do.
Yes! (Score:2)
Check out www.beowulf.org and ltsp.org for more info. This is something that they can easily do in a semester (4 months?) and they can get started on parallel programming in C or Fortran. There are a lot of resources available and I'm sure they will have fun.
A suggestion for the program to write would be something that takes the student's class choices and fits them all into a nice schedule.
Alex
Re:Punch through the "Magic Box" (Score:2)
So - if I was going to teach a high-school class, I would have them make computers out of physical devices - gears, tinkertoys, or even paper.
Good idea. I can't think of a better starting point for researching this kind of exercise than learning about Turing machines. I became most enamored of Turing machines when I learned that, in theory, you could build one entirely out of, say, wood.
It bothers me somewhat that as computers become more and more complex, there are further layers of complexity which hide the dirty details. As computers continue to grow in sophistication, this process is inevitable, but it's a shame that most kids growing up with computers today won't have the same exposure to things at the chip level as was the case 15 or 20 years ago.
Not what I did (Score:2)
Some suggestions:
1) Lego Mindstorms. Get enough of them so your can put 3-5 kids on each and have them compete (cross the room, soccer, whatever).
2) Games games games. Find out what this year's class' favorite game is. Write a (simplified) emulated version of it.
3) Simulation. Have an ongoing "physics simulator" (or something similar) project. The first year the students can do some design and basic coding. The next year they can do more advanced coding. Etc.
4) Simple AI. Do some theorem-proving AIs or ElizaBots or something.
Really, thinking up ideas for a CompSci class is as close as your nearest tech mag.
--
Get The Knuth!!! (Score:2)
I wish someone had pointed me towards the Knuth when I was in high school. It is the ultimate source of CS projects, and the ultimate resource upon their theory.
The Knuth (aka The Art of Computer Programming) is available from all reputable bookstores. You can get the boxed set [barnesandnoble.com] or just the first book [barnesandnoble.com] from barnesandnoble.com.
You can also go to Donald E. Knuth's homepage [stanford.edu], or to his TAOP page [stanford.edu]
Please believe, if there is a deep and magic tome of computer science, this is it, and if you will ever truly have the love for CS, then you will love these books NO MATER YOUR SKILL LEVEL! Every chapter is filled with projects ranging from in your head to graduate thesis level, and they are labeled by difficulty and mathematical requirements.
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
Keep with the times :-) (Score:2)
--
Normal Projects+ (Score:2)
TIC-TAC-TOE(experiment with 2d arrays) had the added assignment for producing a computr player for it.
Our sorting assignment for arrays had the optional assignment of replicating it with a linked list.
Our binary tree assignment had the optional assignment of implementing it in C as well as Java.
Basically you can keep the curriculum you have if it fits the low end CS Student and tack on other assignments for the more interested students. Also ask them to produce demos for a walkthrough for open house. Hand them the IEEE former problems from their programming contests.
Visit Yorktown High School Linux User's Group (Score:2)
No games! (Score:3)
The project was a complete disaster -- nobody knew what the heck they were doing or where to start, the teacher couldn't coordinate the thing, I ended writing most of the code with one other guy.
I think it's best if the teacher already does the modulization (so classes in Java, units in Pascal) etc. and simply gives away the tasks. Everything else will probably fail due to inexperience in software engineering.
Punch through the "Magic Box" (Score:2)
So - if I was going to teach a high-school class, I would have them make computers out of physical devices - gears, tinkertoys, or even paper. Get a simple CPU (or a simple CPU simulator) and teach machine code. Paper computers (where the person plays the role of the CPU, like the old "cardiac") were great for this. Even very young children can understand paper computers - I've taught my 6 year old daughter this way. And most smart kids (like those you would expect to find in an AP class) enjoy learning the "secrets" of how things really work.
Feel free to contact me if you want more details.
- davevr
Here's a Challenging and Stimulating Project (Score:3)
Good luck!
IT
try a complete web application (Score:3)
So why not do something simpler, yet still interesting. Let them design a web application. Something like a dynamic generated website.
The following things should be considered:
You can make this as simple or complicated as you want. Both good programmers and the clueless can work on this and learn (basicly because most talented high school programmers learn nothing about testing,documentation,interface and interaction design, while these are 60-70% of the struggle).
I never learned you should make a testplan before writing software(and yes I'd rather just start coding, but for industrial strenght applications knowing what to test for is better because it shouldn't depend on your design!), I won't even talk about documentation and interaction design. All because (appart from taking every CS course our university had on offer (we didn't have a CS degree course, so there are not that many and deep)) most is self taught or from courses my employer send me to.
Don't just teach them how to code
Make a MUD (Score:3)
This would let the students gravitate to the area they may be most interested in (coders, builders, whatever) and will also allow you to share ideas between more than one class (if you have one, or if the other teachers are into it).
As the actual building requires a lot of creative writing, you may want to see if some of the English teachers / students want to participate as well.
I can't speak for eveyone, but this is the sort of thing my freidns and I were doing in our spare time during highschool anyways, so why not comhine the 2?
Just don't make it too much like work =)
Let them choose. (Score:2)
Work with the class to choose a project that will reinforce the AP curriculum. Then, as a class talk about the design of the application. Once you have a good modular design, create small groups to work on each small, well-defined module. Make them create the stubs so that each group can see exactly what methods they can call and what they can receive from them. Then, implement the darn thing. This teaches good design, good teamwork, and good modularity.
I think that a chat client is a good project. It involves using the network, creating a GUI, interesting data representation questions, and a plethora of different design directions they can choose from.
This was one of the most rewarding things that I did in my Intro. classes at college and it worked out very well. The key for you to remember is that it is the learning process here that is important, not the actual product. YOU are trying to get them to learn the curriculum, not to demonstrate that they already know it. If they do already know it, they will have fun coding anyway!
Have them join existing open-source projects (Score:3)
Even if they are contributing small amounts of code or insight or peer review or documentation, they are still benefitting themselves AND lots of others in the process.
There is such a wide variety of projects out there - just look at SourceForge and the like - that would allow students to make significant contributions to real-world projects while utilizing the principles and practice of good computer science. You would probably have to be the one enforcing that last part, but I can't emphasize enough the value of real-world experience as a complement to the AP/IEEE curriculum.
You would also have the advantage of having lots of infrastructure already set up - no need to worry about establishing project workspaces, titles, task assignments, etc...many projects will already have these in place.
Crypto -- stop laughing, no, really! (Score:4)
Crypto.
The first rule for teaching (or maybe the second, right after "No matter how much they're the spawn of Lucifer, love the kid anyway") is that you don't have to teach a subject; if you can make the subject something the kid wants to learn, the kid will tear into it with the kind of unholy abandon that only teenagers can muster.
Think about the virtues of crypto, and how you can make your students enjoy it. Make it a point to teach the real stuff, not something watered-down. Emphasize that this is "military-grade" stuff [*], and that nobody--not the NSA, not the CIA, not anyone--can break these ciphers [**].
Tell the kids this, and they'll figure out pretty quickly that there are a lot of things they can do with crypto. Some of them will undoubtedly give your principal gray hair, but hey, that's the price of education. Not as if some of those Satanspawn don't already give him more salt than pepper.
There are a lot of ciphers which are fairly simple to sketch out on the whiteboard. I'd suggest Blowfish or RC4; both of them are exquisitely simple in theory, and straightforward in practice. There exists a lot of source code for Blowfish, at least a dozen different implementations in the public domain or Free Software, and RC4 (also sometimes called "arcfour") is almost as widespread.
You'll wind up teaching them about number theory, groups/sets, Boolean logic, the whole nine yards. You could easily spend most of a quarter writing this, and each day in class you'd cover a different aspect of computer science, along with a surprising amount of mathematics.
Crypto is a surprisingly comprehensive discipline. Good crypto libraries require that the programmer have a master-level knowledge of software engineering principles, advanced knowledge of their programming language, and sophistication in how they think about problems.
And when the kids start sending each other PGP-encrypted email over the school network, plotting the violent overthrow of the school and how to best string up their most-hated teachers from trees, you can sit there with a beatific, immensely satisfied smile and say--"Those are my kids."
If you want to know more about crypto and the classroom, feel free to drop me an email. I've got a C++ library for Blowfish which I wrote to teach some younger friends good software engineering principles--it's well-designed, with a boatload of documentation.
[*] Gloss over the fact that there is no accepted definition for "military grade".
[**] Gloss over the fact that there are easier ways to attack ciphers than by cryptanalysis.
collaboration and development skills (Score:2)
Bill
Best project... (Score:2)
It doesn't have to be a great game (don't even attempt to do an FPS - ok, maybe you could do a Battlezone clone), but it should have levels, some sound, and graphics.
Maybe funky 2D vector graphics, ala Asteroids, perhaps? Maybe a maze game, with various levels (a Bolo clone?).
The kids will learn about database creation and management (at a simple level, for the various levels), array handling, graphics (from the sprites or vector stuff), sound (for fx and music), disk handling (need to write the high score table somewhere) - maybe even networking (head to head playing - multi player too, perhaps) and AI (for the enemies, of course).
In fact, I don't think any other project would allow for as many disiplines to come into play as designing and programming a game. Just don't try for the ultimate game - some ideas:
1) Virus Hunter - Guide the nano-ship through the human body, hunting down killer viruses.
2) Dungeon Qwest - Simple 3D style dungeon, done up as line drawings (check out Dungeons of Daggorath for an example)
3) Do an Ultima clone (2d top down tile game).
The list could go on, but these three would be fun to do, and could be completed, to a good extent, by most learning students in a semester (maybe it would be a good reason to come back, and take the class again - just to finish that %$^$!? game!)...
Re:Keep the advanced students not bored (Score:2)
True, however there is quite a difference between "exercise" programs and building applications that could actually benefit someone.
Even having the whole class work on different parts of a program (Like if they were developing Q3 for example: the advanced kids write the engine, some write the AI, some create the graphics, some do the sounds, and rotate as well as communicate with eachother to build a solid understanding of each part of the process).
The language is also a very big part. At least for me, I didn't want to waste my time writing apps in Visual Basic 4 - Perl seemed to grab my interest. While it's understandable that there it would be impossible for a teacher to understand every programming language fluently, a student who wishes to study up on a language himself or perhaps become an apprentince with some perl hackers should be offered.
The biggest part of programming I hated was I felt like I was seriously wasting my time. The teacher didn't know VB, we all had to sit with our faces in a book and go chapter by chapter, doing the program exercises (all he had to do was correct the tests). The programs had no point to them whatsoever - no one would ever had any use for them. My instant-messenging program, however, became incredibly useful and quite popular among the guys in the CS class to communicate back and forth when we weren't allowed to talk.
- Slash
Keep the advanced students not bored (Score:5)
One thing that I had trouble with was keeping busy - the Teacher I had was bright, but not very skillful in computers. He knew I could run the class and that scared him.
I would suggest is asking your students *what* they want to learn - some might want to learn networking, some might want to program, others repair computers. Give them research time to browse the HOWTOs and other more in-depth information.
I got into alot of trouble in my CS class and ended up dropping out because I was at the point of losing my sanity.
If the subject is programming, don't tell them what kind of program to write - just tell them to make one! This is what motivated me. My friend and I spent all of our time writing a instant-messenger over IPX (it was a Novell LAN) while everyone else was writing "exercise programs". We didn't get a grade for it, even though our program was much more advanced than the others'.
Secondly, I would put your IT department to a test. Put $50 on the table and tell them the first one to hack the school's server will get it. This is not only beneficial to your security, it will keep the kids motivated. Make them share how they did it with the class and make a "lesson" out of it. Also, keep the kids busy by having them do computer work in the school. In my school most teachers would have a downtime of over a week before their terminal was fixed. It's free help for the school, and very educational for the student(s). Pair up the smarter kids with some of the not-so-smart-but-able-to-learn kids.
Have a "LAN party" day when everyone who has a computer brings it in and setup a game of "Worms Armageddon" (in this "post-columbine world" as JonKatz would say) Doom or Quake would not be acceptable if you are worried about your job. Have them setup the network and get all the clients configured and have them go at it.
Hope these help... I wish I had these to do in High School...
- Slash
Analysis of the Human Genome (Score:2)
Obviously text processing of a 33MB data stream is pretty intensive. A simple project might just take a subset of the data. A more complex programming exercise might be to make it a beowulf-aware application.
SuperID
Re:games!! (Score:2)
Why not have the whole class devide into groups where each group builds an entire games from the ground up. The game doesn't have to be as hard a 3D, but it does have to be a game that they feel they know intimately. You can't build a game of Bridge if you do not know the rules of Bridge.
If they're are pretty well rehearsed in the world of programming, have them write a card game even one as semmingly simple as Go Fish, or Old Maid. That way they are pretty much sure to know all of the intricacies of the game, ubt it is complex enough to require various coding skills.
I suggested working in groups because if your school year is any where near as short as mine was in high school they won't be able to complete any interesting project in time by themselves. Plus all of the additional reasons for wanting students to work in groups.
Devil Ducky
Coming from an AP CompSci Student. (Score:4)
When I was in computer science, my friend and I were rather experienced in programming so we were able to design our own project. After looking through books and other projects we decided to go for a simple poker game with AI. I know that the project was simple, but it taught us alot about programming teams and modulizing code. Learning to work with other programmers on projects, is a skill that a book can't teach. We learned to divide projects and work with strengths of certain programmers. The concept is applied all over, but for some reasons school systems seem to neglect the fact that people always work with other people on projects.
Hopefully I have been of some help, and realize that there are so many skills that books can't teach, so focus in on those and let the students learn how they want to learn.
Please forgive the lack of structure...writing is not one of my strong points.
Neural Networks (Score:4)
See if any of them are interested in neural networks. It's not a beginning project, but some students are likely to have some experience with programming and AP math should be enough to get started. Here's some reasons:
Just some ideas. I don't think it's beyond the scope of some bright high school students.
Weblog (Score:2)
I.e., one group of 3 does the file storage/database structure, another does the backend scripting/programming for manipulating user accounts and preferences, and a third group does the web page scripting (jsp, perl), to take use the library provided by the second group to actually serve requests and fill in content.
So you have three layers of abstraction: content layer, logic layer, and finally data layer. Each group has to depend on the good design and encapsulation of the other groups' stuff.
Re:AP Curriculum? (Score:2)
I took AP Computer Science (I and II) last year and it is totally C++ based. You learn the basics of C++, but you are always using header files generated by the College Board apstring.h for text strings, apvector.h for one dimensional arrays, and apmatrix.h for two dimensional arrays. At the end of the year, we spent about three days on creating our own header files.
Perhaps my class was a bad example, but we were totally unprepared for the AP exam and the final where the teacher simply copied a practice AP exam.
Though the teacher attempted to make (somewhat) realistic situations out of the assignments, they still failed to be interesting because of the limits that were imposed upon us. If you really want to make it interesting, assign projects where the students have an open end to think of their own solutions.
What my APCS teacher did (Score:4)
My teacher had plans to have our class work on a program as a team. It never got past the planning stage, which was limited to exactly what I just told you, so I can't really give you details. But I can give you my ideas.
First you need to come up with an idea for the program. It should be fun or interesting (or both) so you'll keep their attention. You should probably write main() yourself, but:
Have the students write -- individually or in small groups -- the functions that actually make the program work. Each team/individual should only be given information necessary to writing their part of the program, probably limited to what inputs they need to take, and outputs they need to give. You'll probably need to write test programs for each of these functions, too.
The idea is to have everyone work on an independant part of the program, and then watch and see how their part helps out all the rest, even though they weren't involved in those parts, and probably don't even know what they're doing.
It's a great way to show how teamwork in programming can pay off.
--
I've got an original project! (Score:2)
Lord knows we need another one of those...
Coming from a High School CS Student (Score:2)
As far as AP curriculum, it's all in C++. Nothing real crazy is involved. First year students need to know basic class structure, arrays, matrices, but nothing even touch pointers or data structures. We're talking VERY basic. The AP Board even makes an easy to us apstring class so that students don't have to deal with pointers in strings either. The focus is on the algorithms.
As for the second year students they get a little bit more. You learn pointers, basic data structures (linked lists, doubly-linked lists, binary trees) and learn new sorting algorithms. You still don't touch any powerful features of C++ such as the STL, class inheritance, polymorphism, etc.
To keep myself busy in that class and not become bored I used to play with the graphics package that we had. It was severely limited but I was still able to create a primitive (VERY primitive) 3d engine that could draw cubes and tetrahedrens and rotate them. Another fun activity that we did was draw fractals with recursion. You can get some unusual results especially add in color.
Well that's what my experience with AP Comp Sci is.
Changing programmers. (Score:2)
Have a simple database project that runs in two phases. Phase I is basic functionality. The project would be to get the thing working. Grade A-F.
Next, take all the B,C and D designs. Assign the D designs to kids who got A's and B's the first time around, C designs to C students, and B designs to the rest of the students. Add some new requirements, like reports that need to be run off of the database, as Phase II.
Students are then graded on how well their program meets both the Phase I and Phase II requirements.
Sadistic? Perhaps. But that would be great training for how programming works in the real world.
Re:Here's a Challenging and Stimulating Project (Score:2)
..or maybe fue, now that I examine it more closely.
The question is, does
Can one find zen in a state of entropy?
games!! (Score:2)
What we did in my HS CS class... (Score:3)
To sum my experience up; whatever project you decide to do there are a few things that _must_ be done ahead of time. A working knowledge of the language the project is being coded in, a formal specification of the project that is rather difficult to change (unless absolutely necessary) and interest in the project are all very important to the success of the project.
Re:games!! (Score:2)
The problem (Score:3)
(College tends to be a place of re-learning for those who come into different trades, I know, but that does not mean the rest of us have to suffer.)
I just pasted my first year of Computer Systems Technology, before that I took the first year of Computer Science. It was boring as hell. It was like being back in Grade 11 again, because everyone else had to catch up. They should really design 2 different programs.
Keeping that in mind. One of the things we barely touched on was actually how video is displayed, and how to manipulate it from the most basic levels.
And what about the hardware aspect? (Using Parallel and Serial ports). Why not create a computer controlled robotic arm from scratch? Or some other device.
Show them how computers recognize hardware from the basic levels. Get some bread boards and dip switches, make some devices the computers can recognize that they exist as a hardware component (they don't actally have to do anything however).
I think more teachers should ask the students what they would like to accomplish from the course. My electronics teacher did that this year, but he had to give everyone the same, fair chance. Originally the last project was to build a device that recognized keyboard outputs and display them on a breadboard on a few led bars or numeric display. But instead the last project was a 10 base binary counter, because most people couldn't get there timers to function correctly or kept blowing the components.
I am not saying we should leave people in the dust if they don't know as much, but the course should and can be designed around the individual student, if you plan it right.
Re:Not what I did (Score:2)
1) Lego Mindstorms...
2) Games games games...
3) Simulation...
4) Simple AI...
That reminds me: I think that having a class-wide RealTimeBattle [lysator.liu.se] competition would be awesome. RealTimeBattle kind of incorporates all of these four elements: you have a computer-simulated robot that competes with other computer-simulated robots in a simulated world where they (what else?) try to blow each other up. Really easy to make a dumb robot, really hard to make a great robot. I have always thought that RTB would be a great way to suck kids into liking CS.
IIRC, RTB is GPLed but currently only runs on Linux. On the other hand, the robots can be written in anything (server spawns child processes and talks to them via stdin/stdout) and I bet it wouldn't be too much of a trick to write a "wrapper" robot that ran on Linux and just forwarded requests and responses over a TCP connection, so the robots themselves could be running on a Windows or Mac box.
--
-jacob
6 degrees... (Score:3)
Input
Word 1: slash
Word 2: troll
Output
slash
flash
flask
flank
blank
bland
blend
bleed
breed
bread
tread
triad
trial
trill
troll
One of the requirements was that it had to be somewhat efficient, so we had to compute the one-letter permutations of a word at most once and preferably not at all (in the case that program never needs to know).
It was a terribly fun project: it was possible for me even when I didn't have much programming experience but it made me stretch my brain a bit, and it was a whole lot of fun to play with.
--
-jacob
Re:AP Curriculum? (Score:2)
- The main focus was on engineering the system, not coding. This meant data models and modules dependancy diagrams, thinking before coding.
- We worked in teams. This meant you also had to deal with organizational issues. Not fun, but important lesson. It also requires that you develop good specs for others to work with, have a good plan ahead of time, and aren't coding on the fly.
- The projects were usually pretty interesting: One year they had Anti-chess (try to lose all your pieces, if you can take a piece you must. Also had optional AI contest), another pinball. My year it was a marbles game called abalone.
Now, I'll admit a lot of these lessons aren't necessary for the AP test. The AP test was pretty easy though (but my school only did the easy one, CS A, I think).Important Considerations (Score:2)
From the: Betcha-can't-do-that-with-only-a-stick-of-gum dept.
In the course of my education there have been two overriding things that have helped me the best in learning. While these do not always point to the best way to teach, they are certainly something to consider, and many projects can stem from them.
Just my $0.02 as usual. Some good considerations.
Software women like (Score:2)
Microsoft Greetings 99 (creates HallMark-quality cards)
PuzzleMaster (jigsaw puzzles)
Diablo II
IMHO, women generally like software that they can express themselves in a creative, non-violent fashion. My mother and aunt will spend hours, nonstop, making b-day cards on the computer; they just can't get enough of it. And puzzles...don't even get me started...
On the other hand, my girlfriend wants me to teach her Diablo II, and my best friend's wife and him are constantly wrestling to play Diablo II (only one computer; it's horrible. She loved Diablo, BTW). While both games are pretty violent, there are very simple and fast to learn, with an excellent rewards-based system ("leveling up"). Of course, the fact that you can "dress up" your character *may* have something to do with it...
hypo-machine (Score:2)
It was great in teaching me how memory addresses and instructions work in a CPU. I think it's learning fundamental things like this that really helps the students understand want happens when they run a program.
AP CS Project (Score:2)
-----------------------
Yet another suggestion(or 5) (Score:3)
I hope you use these suggestion
-------------
individual creativity (Score:2)
People that age, not that I'm really that far from that age still, generally feel a need to define themselves. Such expression can take many forms, from being "good" at attending and participating in parties, dressing up for that sort of thing, to learning to play an instrument, writing material, performing on stage, creating artwork, debating and reasoning well; etc.
My highschool teacher had a very strong emphasis on allowing people to spend most of the time in various classes working on a project of their own creation using certain tools, and demonstrating certain understood concepts. Most of these projects ended up being hypercard stacks, logo or apple-soft basic programs, but they were still fun, expressive, and taught people about programming concepts.
If your students have had a chance to familiarize themselves with working in a Unix environment, then asking them to program in it would probably be appropriate to avoid frustrations involving rebooting, and restoring code.
Personally I would suggest you allow them to design simple games, something with points and scoring. I recall people made programs that played card games, did brick-out, followed some sort of sci-fi plot of chasing aliens using game-paddles and a simple sprite collision thing. At the end of the class, the games could be made available for a class day or two to all the students to play each others games. This puts a friendly amount of pressure to impress and polish while it encourages students to lean over to their neighbor and ask, "If you were using my program, would this interface make sense, or would this one?" We actually did something like this in most of our programming classes.
Breaking out some of the older tech, like paddles and apple-][s with simple, documented, peek/poke interfaces to most things really helped to make it simpler to develop something fun without frustration. While these days it may take a pretty geeky kid to be proud of a program that doesn't have menus or dialogs and doesn't multi-task, they should still have something to point at and say, "I made that."
This brings me to my second point; have them work on this project individually. They won't ask too much about the policy because its just like writing an essay or painting some watercolor paper, it needs to express the creator. Working in groups throws up too many questions when people look back and think, how much of this cool thing can I take credit for? Did I really write much of it, was it my idea? Further problems arise with common high-school lazyness that allows team members to leave the work to one dedicated person.
Recently, if your students are up to a bit of threading or whatever, I've thought that a networking project might engage them more. Perhaps something of a chat program that can handle say 5 users at once in a peer to peer chat with a very simple, specific api to which all the students can write a different program. Perhaps even writing a central server for them and specifying how communication should be handled with it, to let them each write "my-nifty-client" would keep them happy.
Of course, while most of the class time should be dedicated to writing one program of their choice, there should be a few other assigned tasks. Some simple, small, comprehension of concept programs might be nice. Also a writen test is never too bad an idea, but don't take it too seriously there or some students won't care what they write because they'll feel they can't resurect their grade from the test score. Of course encouraging students to have programming time after school may help get most projects actually done, and will help add glitter and glam to the over zealous programmer's projects.
Basically, you want them to think little about common sorts, fifo stacks and such and concentrate more on some arithmetic and random number generating fun, with use of some interface, be it text or graphics. That is if you want them to remain interested in the class. Particularly, if they have a program in mind already, they may get bored as you explain a merge-sort, because it doesn't in anyway apply to their arena gladiator simple RPG.
-Daniel
idea (Score:2)
we used C++ (or VC++ if we wanted) and tools like ErWin and iSQL.
this was for a 'group' grade, so the team was the only important part and we competed among groups.
this was one of the best projects that i was invloved in during school b/c it involved alot of time and alot of work, but the payoff was great.
the project involved a print shop and the need to have a daily printed schedule for employees to use for machine set up. the DB was to have a front end to input jobs and then a master screen to print out the days work. no crystal reports, etc. pure programming work only. print outs had to be able to be tailored to user need, ie sorted by day, by type, by materials needed, etc.
it was the prof's brother's real company and real job that had been done for his shop a couple of years earlier. the prof acted the part of his brother - we set up meetings, showed him milestones, WIP, etc. was alot of fun.
since these are AP highschool kids (my brother was one who just graduated in 2000) this is well within their reach.
Can you imagine (Score:2)
I grep, therefore I am
Re:One thing that would be good (Score:2)
Make a point of keeping your art students tired, so they'll snap at the protonerds. Once a project spec has been decided, make it an integral part of the art students role to keep the objectives changing.
And the art school project managers should never, ever thank the protonerds... Just like real life!!!
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Playstation games (Score:2)
Dev tools and information are available online here [execpc.com], here [psxdev.de] and here [consoledev.com].
The hardware's inexpensive (very cheap compared to PCs).
You can introduce abstract concepts like pointers and pipelining without boring them, because they can see where it's leading.
MIPS assembly language is quite sane, and there's an excellent text book [mkp.com] which teaches architecture and assembly programming using MIPS.
Splitting up a large project like a game into managable chunks, then sitting down and writing one of them in C/assembler and seeing how your decisions affect the game as a whole will be a much better introduction to OO analysis and design than cramming Java down their throats.
The amount of performance you can get out of 2 Mb of RAM and a 33 MHz processor should make them think a bit about OS bloat.
Last but not least, when they finish their project they'll have something to play with.
(You'll need to fit the Playstations with mod chips if you want to test CDR copies of your game. For simpler/earlier testing a MIPS simulator is available here [wisc.edu].)
Let them pick (Score:2)
If your class is on numerical techniques Romberg integration, Runge-Kutta integration, Monte Carlo integration, or whatever.
If your class is less focused, you could say they must use everything on a list, or you could let them choose one thing from each of several lists.
Also specify what they're allowed to use. For example, if they use STL, implementing a stack doesn't require understanding it. If they use a linear algebra package, finding eigenvalues of a triangular matrix is trivial. However, if they code these things themselves, it will require they understand how the algorithms work, but also require much more of their time. I guess whether you allow things like qsort is a matter of what the point of the class is and your (and their) taste(s).
suggestions (Score:2)
Re:Actual applications (Score:3)
Now maybe it's not such a big deal in HS but it seems like somebody needs to notice that you guys never got anything done. That means the scope of the project must be scaled down (a real world skill) and project management has to be more efficient. Being a CS course and not a management course it seems to me that it should have focussed more on programming than managment. This *especially* in light of the huge numbers of people applying to colleges when they are not even remotely capable programmers. (In fact most colleges expect you to be a competent programmer by the time you arrive on campus)
I'm not trying to knock the class but as you progress into college and the real world not completing projects means no passing grade or no food on your plate. Granted it is decent practice for *management* activities but you won't usually be doing that for several years. Seems like your teacher was simulating the 'below average' programming project year after year. I hope (s)he pointed out how much programmers underestimate the time it takes to do a project.
Re:Ideas for projects: (Score:3)
Speed programming turns into typing contests when the programmers are good. They learn shortcuts in proramming which is gerenally a bad habit. They also learn not to plan and think things through, etc. I think you get the picture.
Computer Modeling? (Score:3)
There are many systems in biology and physics that are not too difficult to describe using a computer program.
give them a taste of the real-world (Score:3)
MONDAY: Assign some vague requirements for the project (say a sort program) and make the project due on Friday.
TUESDAY: Answer their questions about the requirements and tell them it's now due on Thursday.
WEDNESDAY: Change the requirements completely.
THURSDAY: Collect the assignments and critique them in front of everyone.
FRIDAY: Make each student add some minor enhancement to the project, but they must modify the code from the person on their left, NOT their own code.
Have each student's grade determined by the student who had to "enhance" the code, not by the teacher, and not even by whether the code worked or not.
New Mexico SuperComputer Challenge (Score:4)
The web site has links to previous projects to give you some ideas about the kind of work that some of the teams have done, but overall I will say that the work is of remarkably high quality. This is a school-year-long event, so many of the projects will need to be shortened for semester-long use. They may also need to be made more simple.
As a side note, I should mention that although all of the projects can benefit from supercomputer time, the Challenge is over 10 years old as a program now. As a result, most of the projects run find on mid-range desktops (but are, neverthless, computationally intensive tasks).
The way things are going... (Score:5)
Start a company
Syllabus: 1] Write code that does nothing - but has buzzwords like "B2B" or "Sharing" in it. 2] Be written up in Slashdot. 3] Get VC funding. 4] Be written up in Slashdot again, with nearly identical commentary to the first. 5] Make the cover of a half dozen clueless magazines. 6] Be ignored by Slashdot. 7] Count stock options worth several billion dollars. 8] Get sued by some equally clueless industry group afraid their fat cash cow is going away. 9] Be written up in Slashdot, with more redundant commentary. 10] Pursue the lawsuit in front of some absurdly clueless judge who slaps a restraining order on the idea of "programming" because it could violate some businesses ability somewhere to make money. 11] Did I mention being written up in Slashdot? 12] Go out of business, because after all, the code did nothing.
big project, little sections. (Score:3)
I find the best way is to pick a big, over-reaching project. Then teach by sections. You don't even need to tell the kids that they're doing little bits of a big picture.
One example that I've used, is, and I've seen it below, a physics-accurate space ship modeler. Start out with simple programming techniques. First, hardcode a distance, and a mass, and prints them out. Then it runs them through an acceleration formula, and prints the results. This shows basic flow, variables, and printf. Next, get distance and mass from the keyboard. This teaches, scanf, and equivalents. Next, get distance and mass, and use a loop structure to display velocity at every interval. Go from there. Eventually, you can add all sorts of neat things, until you manage to get what is basically a fairly accurate working simulation of the solar system, and a basic navigation system for ships. Then you add in the networking protocols, ship statistics, and combat models.... The important thing is, though, not to teach concepts. Write programs. From programming, learn concepts.User interface... (Score:3)
Wound up trimming it down to joysticks and what is a natural way for users to use them (i.e. - expected controls models and such).
With all the talk that hits the /. boards about interfaces and the good/bad points about them maybe that's something for your students to look at.
A fresh set of eyes on a old problem.
Malk-a-mite
Ideas for projects: (Score:5)
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
High Schoolers (Score:4)
2) Go to www.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net] and let them pick out a project to watch/join in. Nothing is more exhilarating than to know that code your writting is going to real use (even if the project justs rejects it as not good enough - but you as the teacher should help them), not just text-book examples on loops and theory.
Just my
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
Let them pick. (Score:5)
At the beginning of the year, everyone picked a project -- two misguided students teamed up to write an OS, I picked a chess-playing program, someone did a database, someone did a simple BBS, someone did a symbolic math package, and so on. There were few restrictions on what you could pick, although you were encouraged to pick a year-sized chunk of work that was reasonably useful from a real-world perspective. We worked on these out of class for the year; she tried devoting class to status reports, but that was mostly useless -- who wants to hear the status of someone else's project? So she started devoting class to random CS tidbits, in chunks of a week or two. The only tidbits that really stick in my mind are a couple weeks' worth of Lisp (with most of the class being us solving in-class Lisp problems, on paper or in the computer lab) and a basic introduction to hashing. The in-class stuff was basically killing time, though; almost all the grades were from the projects. I think there was the occasional class devoted entirely to question-and-answer, also, although the saintly Ms. Bunn handled most project problems outside of class.
As I said, this was the most amazingly cool CS education I've ever gotten. In the course of finishing a project, you were guaranteed to pick up a whole lot of useful crap, but you also had the sense that you were doing something important (as opposed to the "Todaay, wee willl bee learnning aabout graaph algoorithmms..." style of education), and it was cool as hell once the projects got to the point that they were actually functioning programs ("Holy shit, it's really playing chess!") Most of the projects were structured so that there was no real stopping-place, so there was no risk of running out of work -- when I announced that my chess engine was as good as I could make it, Ms. Bunn smiled and gave me a book that described alpha-beta search, which kept me busy for the next several days continuously until it worked, and then until the end of the year trying to make it better. For the BBS or the symbolic math package, you could just keep adding features. The OS, of course, was barely begun at the end of the year, but what had been written appeared pretty sound, so I think the kids escaped without too bad a grade. I think a couple of people actually managed to "finish;" Ms. Bunn just let them slack for the rest of the year, but I could see you handling this differently.
Anyway, my advice to you is to try to separate the kids who want to take a class on CS from the kids who want to learn about CS, and then do something akin to the above for the ones who want to learn -- some of them will stun you with how much they produce when you let them produce whatever they want. Keep the class pretty small so you can keep track of each student's progress pretty regularly, make sure the students aren't afraid to switch projects if the one they're on is too hard, easy, or unrewarding, and throw good, informative books & websites at them like Mardi Gras beads -- if a student hasn't done any work for a week, it's probably because he doesn't know a certain syscall or file format.
A few more project ideas, somewhat modernized from when I was in HS: An mp3 player ("You're done? Okay, now write the encoder."), a side-scrolling one-player game, a simple web server, a corewars simulator, a packet sniffer (they'll love that), a file compression utility. None of these are completely beyond the reach of a talented HS student with a school year to throw at the problem, but they're all "real" programs, such that when people do start getting them working, they'll feel like gods. They'll also have long since forgotten that they're learning.
Casino games. (Score:3)
I managed to pull off Keno and Blackjack. They were a lot harder than they seemed. Keno required a graphical interface with the ncurses library that was probably harder than most menu interfaces you'd see, like pine or capt. Blackjack was a little easier, except programming in things like split, double down, and insurance, which was a headache.
My friend pretty much catapulted himself from novice programmer to experienced programmer in two weeks with Deuces Wild. Now that one was a nightmare. Not only did he become obsessed with randomizing and shuffling the deck, but the algorithm for determining the final hand was incredibly complicated. To make matters worse, he insisted on testing the thing on a 4 megahertz machine from about 1986.
Anyway, I've written a lot of worthless software, but nothing has been as useful later as casino games.
Re:More information please (Score:3)
In my first CS class (back in 7th grade), we used the "most prevalant" system of the day - the Apple II. By the time I graduated HS, they were long gone.
For introducing the basics, I recomend UNIX (or Linux or whatever flavor you like) because the i/o and file system are very transparant and easy to teach. Even this is a small advantage, and not worth starting Holy Wars over.
Beyond that criteria, which OS you use in a high school classroom is utterly meaningless.
Re:More information please (Score:5)
It seems to me there are a few basic concepts that I would want a student to come with after his/her first computer class:
1. The basics of computer hardware, and file systems. A *n?x box of some kind seems to be the best choice for this, but you can teach the same concepts with a Windows PC or a Mac if you have no choice.
2. Programming. For an intro class, you can get by with Basic, Pascal, or even shell scripting... the point is to get the concepts of loops, conditions, and so on intot he kids' heads. For more advanced students, move on to an object based language. Don't chew your nails over the platform choice... whatever they use will be obsolete by the time they are out of college anyway. Just get them started.
3. Relational Databases. The school guidance counselor is probably telling your kids that database knowledge is a boarding pass for the Gravey Train. They should be, anyway. Again, don't worry about which platform you teach from. The concepts are very portable, and nobody really knows which database company will be the "it girl" of 2004.
4. Networking. Programming plaforms change, OS platforms change, database platforms change (I'm starting to sound like Avrey Brooks), but networking is the past, present, and future of the digital revolution. Make sure your kids understand TCP/IP, everything from the basics of sub-net masks to IP spoofing. Get down to the nitty-gritty of network file systems. Talk at length about client/server, thin clients, fat clients, terminal apps, web applets, ftp, http, ppp, and lots of other acronyms ending in "p". Give them an introduction to IPv6, the Common Language the whole world will be speaking in a few years. Bring Cisco geeks in as guest speakers. Then, once your kids are network guru's, have them promise when they get older they will remember to send you a photo of their yacts from their summer homes in New Zealand, and let you be a guest at their Florida country club once in a while.
5. Project Management. Once your kids have all the basic skills covered, it is time to let them use a little creativity to come up with their own projects and strut their stuff. If they want to design a game, fine... have them form a design team and get started. Applied knowledge is where the real learning begins.
Hardware Stuff - Build a Computer and a Robot (Score:3)
If you have any measure of electronics skills and a good crop of kids in the classroom (which they probably are, if they're bored), try building something neat with them.
When I was in high school, one of the things I built was a small computer.
Nothing fancy, all you need is an empty piece of Veroboard or some other prototyping bits (even Radio Shack has it), a Z80 processor, some RAM chips, and an EPROM programmer.
The part of the class that is good with their hands can assemble the computer and get the hardware done. (A few chips, none with more than 40 pins, it will take them a few classes, but not too long.) The rest of the class can punch in an assembly language program that you can provide on paper (find it on the 'net, or write something quickly), assemble it, then burn it to an EPROM.
From there, you can plop the EPROM into the hardware department's product, turn it on, and either have it work, or not. <grin>
And then there's other stuff...
When I was in high school, I built a small robot arm. It was controlled by my old TI-99/4A, which used to write information to the parallel port. I used the 4 MSB (most significant bits) of the parallel port's 8 bit byte to select a given motor on the arm, and the 4 LSB (least significant bits) selected the operation: Hold, forward one step, backwards one step.
Of course, used in this manner, I could have controlled a lot more motors, but my technology at that time was primitive!
Feedback to the computer on arm position was done by using the keyboard. When the arm reached one limit or another, a switch was triggered, and that switch was in parallel with a key on the keyboard.
All the programming was in TI-BASIC, loaded into the machine from a cassette. I could make the arm do certain movement by "printing" a character to the parallel port. When the arm reached a limit of motion, the TI-BASIC "CALL KEY" instruction, which would test for key presses, detected it. A loop of printing instructions and then checking the values returned by CALL KEY gave it full feedback and allowed the robot arm to pick up objects without crushing tem, move them precisely, put them down, and even return to pick them up from the same place as it put them down.
Of course, there was no practical use to this setup, but it was cheap and easy to build: a few surplus stepper motors from old printers, a power supply, a homebuilt stepper motor controller. The arm itself was a drawer rail (allowing for in and out movement on one axis) with a piece of picture hanging wire on the shaft of a motor to turn the rail in and out. The gripper was made with Mechano and operated on another stepper motor. And there were pivots for the gripper, the base of the arm and the angle of the arm, all built with junk and stepper motors.
It was fun, and it was thoroughly useless. But it was something that my friends liked to play with when they were at my place, so I think a classroom might enjoy it. I wrote routines for it that would put pepper onto dinner, or ketchup onto a hot dog, even put a battery into a radio. Of course, all those things have to be in exactly the positions where the robot thinks they are, before it can manipulate them.
Of course, today, you could use an XT as a controller; you wouldn't need to worry about waiting for cassette-based programs to load.
Actual applications (Score:5)
At the start of the term, everyone in the class applied to "jobs", with resumes and everything. According to what you applied for, and how you presented yourself (not necessarily your skillset), you got certain jobs. One person was chosen as the "VP" (the Pres was the prof), and had to manage a lot of stuff, as well as do some work. We had three departments: Coding, UI, and QA (whose job it was to make the coders and the UIs co-operate). There were department leaders, and then inside the deparments, if there were special task forces, they had team leaders, and so on. Basically, our prof tried to make it as much like a company as possible. It was a lot of fun. No class (to my knowledge) has actually completed the project, but it's the process that's important.
For me, it was really helpful to learn how to work well in teams, and how the real world operates. It was a lot of fun, and I think you learn more than doing games, or anything like that.
Instant messengers. (Score:3)
A real software project (Score:3)
- Rackham
"You can't protect anyone.... You can only love them."
Teach a real programming language (Score:3)