Re: Perl Assignments Needed

[bwelch]

Try to find assignments that are both interesting and fun. Games work well for this, even if they are simple. If possible, make it so students can compete with each other. Better yet, let the student's programs compete with each other.

Another approach could have students create things that are useful to them. Assignments that are useful for other classes or at home would (hopefully) allow students to see the value of using Perl. This is probably harder to create and only reasonable if you see something appropriate.

[NiJo]

The classic for 'program vs. program' is robot programming. This can be aibots (Perl engine, proprietary robot command language) or http://realtimebattle.sourceforge.net/ (Unix, message based communication via pipes, agnostic to programming languages).

A fun way to introduce and evolutionize concepts: E. g. students will develop a maze of 'if' statements; you introduce state machines.

Becoming off-topic I'd not teach the language but problem solving, common algorithms and concepts. Perl has a lot of algorithm per line of code, reducing distraction.