Re^2: [OT] Perl / Computer Science Science Fair Projects

[MidLifeXis]

I wish I could ++ this a few times.

The computer science club at my college used to (perhaps still does) host a programming contest for high school students. While the participants were under a more compressed time frame, the assumption that we made for the easiest program was if/then/else and a loop construct of some sort. More advanced problems included nested control structures, switch statements, text processing (think split and join), and other problems that are easily programmed multiple times a day by anyone who does a modest amount of programming.

Remember that this should stretch the capabilities of the student, not stress them to the point of breaking :)

[Anonymous Monk]

Go is probably too complicated, and tic-tac-toe has some subtleties, but one thing that might be interesting and not too hard is to build a simple game, like nim, with *learning* capability. It's been a long while since I did this but I recall that it just involved making a tree structure to store possible moves, storing the results as a score, and then doing a tree traversal to see what gives you the highest or lowest "Score". Look up something called a "minmax" algorithm. (although you'll find a bunch of people have done this particular one already) The game of "mastermind" might also be a good balance of easy to program and interesting, although not so easy to do a tree for. PS It's not perl but take a look at the Alice language from CMU. Makes it easy to do visuals to go with a game.