Nifty Assignments

A great CS assignment is a delight to all, but the path to one can be most roundabout. Many CS students have had their characters built up on assignments that worked better as an idea than as an actual assignment. Assignments are hard to come up with, yet they are the key to student learning. The Nifty Assignments special session is all about promoting and sharing the ideas and ready-to-use materials of successful assignments.

Each presenter will introduce their assignment, give a quick demo, and describe its niche in the curriculum and its strengths and weaknesses. The presentations (and the descriptions below) merely introduce each assignment. A key part of Nifty Assignments is the mundane but vital role of distributing the materials -- handouts, data files, starter code -- that make each assignment ready to adopt. The Nifty Assignments home page, http://nifty.stanford.edu, gathers all the assignments and makes them and their support materials freely available.

If you have an assignment that works well and would be of interest to the CSE community, please consider applying to present at Nifty Assignments. See the nifty.stanford.edu home page for more information.