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Nifty Assignments
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by Debbie Carter
Lancaster Country Day School
Lancaster, Pennsylvania
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| | The Nifty Assignments session at the annual Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) meeting is one of the most popular sessions at the conference. Started by Nick Parlante (Stanford University) in 1999, this session is always outstanding. Everyone gathers to hear the current year's "nifty" assignment ideas.
Borrowing the idea from Nick (actually, more than borrowing), we have put together our AP Computer Science Nifty Assignments. Here, AP CS teachers have the opportunity to exchange creative assignments given to their students.
We have attempted to classify the assignments according to course and to list the topics covered next to the assignment.
AP Computer Science A
 Using a Date Class: Creating objects using a premade class, calling a class's methods
Car Rental: String parsing, ASCII, if, loop, % (modulus)
Guessing Game: Comparisons, random numbers, loops, binary search (add-on)
Tollbooth Programming Series: Methods/return, inheritance, if, loops/random, ArrayList, math
operators, Iterator
AP Marine Biology Simulation Case Study: Choose-Your-Own Modifications: Proposal, design,
follow-up documentation
Cat and Mouse: Graphical calculations, comparisons, applet, AWT
Twelve Days of Christmas: Loop, if/switch, array and/or recursion
Hailstone Sequence: Method, max/min, simple recursion
AP Computer Science AB
Hospital Emergency Room Simulation: Queue or PriorityQueue
Mighty Cabbage Patch Micro: Stack, infix and postfix notation
Game of Life: Matrices
Windows, Regions, and Squares: LinkedList, Big-Oh, applet, AWT
Indexing a Textbook: TreeMap, List, input from file, string parsing
Hash Table and Binary Search Tree Comparison: Hash table, binary search tree
Banking Simulation: Design discussion
Beyond the AP Topics
Graphics with Sound and Animation: Applet, AWT, MouseListener, sound, animation
To view the great ideas presented at the SIGCSE Nifty Assignments session over the past few years, visit the Nifty Web site.
Nifty Assignments
Penn State student Lucy Chen also contributed to this compilation.
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