In this assignment students work as a team to build, using only specified materials, a structure through which a marble will travel,  Students first work independently developing their own segment of the structure and then work collaboratively to construct a final structure. Students are required to video tape the execution of a marble traveling through the structure lasting at least n seconds. This exercise will allow students to practice problem decomposition, abstraction, generalization, and evaluation, and also debugging and testing.

This exercise was developed as part of the NSF-funded Computational Creativity project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

This assignment helps students gain experience and proficiency with the Python pandas package in order to learn how to visualize weather data.  Students use Python to get sample outputs and then graph weather data such as maximum and minimum temperatures as well as number of days with rain. 

In this assignment students work as a team to develop chapters of a story where the first and last sentence of the chapter is prescribed. Students first work independently developing their own chapter and then work collaboratively to identify and resolve logical inconsistencies in the chapters in order to produce a final coherent story.  This exercise will allow students to practice problem decomposition, abstraction, and evaluation, and also debugging and testing.

This exercise was developed as part of the NSF-funded Computational Creativity project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Students will be required to clearly describe the functions of an ordinary object they may use daily, as if they were the inventor of the object. This exercise will allow students to practice problem decomposition, abstraction, algorithmic thinking, and evaluation; as well as, modular programming and encapsulation. To encourage practice, this exercise fosters creativity; asking students to look at the objects in new ways, such as examining the object’s environment and considering its usage. Students work together to develop teamwork skills.

This exercise was developed as part of the NSF-funded Computational Creativity project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

In this tutorial, students will learn how to navigate the EarSketch environment, and begin to use Python commands through the exploration of a song. Students are then invited to create their own song(s). After this tutorial, students will be able to use EarSketch's full curriculum and acquire deeper knowledge about Python and music composition and remixing.

This exercise is appropriate for high school-level AP CS Principles courses and well as CS0 courses at the collegiate level. This exercise is derived from a tutorial developed for the Hour of Code. It can be completed by following the instructions in the attached documents and working in the EarSketch environment (earsketch.gatech.edu).

EarSketch is a free and online learning environment. No prior knowledge in music or Python are necessary to teach this exercise. With EarSketch, students code in Python to place samples from a vast sound library into musical tracks, arrange them, and add effects.

Lightboard Lab is a loops/lists/tuples lab assignment for a CS0/CS1 course. For this lab, students program 8x8 matrices of LED lights via a Fadecandy microcontroller. Students are encouraged to work in pairs and/or individually for this lab.

Game of Student's Choice is a loops/file I/O/strings/lists/dictionaries/classes programming assignment for a CS0/CS1 course. For this assignment, students have the option of either implementing an object-oriented Tic Tac Toe game (for which the requirements are rigorously specified) or a game of their choice (for which the requirements are loosely specified). The purpose of providing the option is to support students who are not comfortable yet with classes to get started with scaffolding (Tic Tac Toe) and to support those who are comfortable with classes to get started on a project of their own imagination.

ASCII Text Art is a loops/file I/O/strings/lists/dictionaries programming assignment for a CS0/CS1 course. For this assignment, students read in 26 text files, where each files stores ASCII art for a letter of the upper case alphabet. For example, A.txt stores ASCII art for the letter A, B.txt stores ASCII art for the letter B, and so on. The ASCII art for each letter is represented in the program as a list of strings, one string per line in the file. Collectively, all 26 lists are stored in a dictionary as letter (key) and list (value) pairs. Once loaded into the dictionary, the assignment requires students to modify the ASCII art by replacing characters. Lastly, the program prompts the user for a string of letters and the program writes the string to a file using the modified ASCII art.

PPM Image Modifier is a loops/file I/O/strings programming assignment for a CS0/CS1 course. For this assignment, students open a PPM image file, apply a modification to the image, and write the modified image to an output image file. The modifications for the students to perform include: negate, high contrast, gray scale, remove red, remove green, and remove blue. Students are to work individually on the assignment.

Craps is a functions/conditionals/loops programming assignment for a CS0/CS1 course. To do this assignment, students implement the game and add personality output by including "chatter" messages.

Students are to work individually on the assignment.