In this project using Python, students are asked to read two files containing Twitter feeds, merge them in reverse chronological order, and provide some basic summary information about the files.

Playing a role as an editor in the music industry, students in this project are asked to compile a list of the 10 best bands of all time. Students will need to write a program in Python which merges two files, one which holds a list of bands, the year the band was formed, and the number of albums sold (in millions), and the other data file has a list of bands and a rating of their critical acclaim, from zero to five stars. The output should be the band name, followed by the number of albums sold, followed by the critics' rating.

In this project, students are asked to read the entire corpus of Shakespeare's Plays and Sonnets and print out the individual words, each word processed slightly, in sorted order. Students accomplish this task with two programs, one a python program that students write and the other a one-line shell script, that calls the python program and pipes its output to the sort utility.

In this project, students use Python to develop a filter to remove the initial white noise in an audio file. The CS concepts of tokens, strings, and circular buffers are explored.

In this project, students are tasked with straightening out somebody else's mess, namely, a bunch of image data have become scrambled across two files. Students are asked to merge the two files and reconstruct the image.

In this project, students are given a task of providing a scientific report to the US Geological Survey about earthquake data. To generate the report, students need to write a Python program which will store earthquake data such as date, time, latitude, longitude, magnitude, depth, and region over a 7 day period of time.

Using the scenario of “Logsoft” a fictitious company that specializes in designing and maintaining logging software, students are asked to examine and manipulate a program that captures user activity for the company. Students are challenged with writing a utility that can merge two files correctly, one for capturing specific user information, and one file that runs even if it encounters a bad section of a disk.

Using statistics from the US Open Tennis Tournament, students create a program in Python that asks a user enter eight distinct numbers related to an individual tennis player. The program then uses those numbers to compute and report three statistics in order: number of serves attempted, double fault percentage, and ace percentage.

In this project, students are asked to examine the cost of modifications done to a car and the impact on its fuel efficiency. Using python, students use certain functions such as number of miles driven per year, current mpg, cost (in dollars) of a gallon of gasoline, cost of the modification, and percent increase in mpg after the modification, in order to determine how long it will take the owner of the car to recoup their investment.

This assignment introduces the concepts of bio-computation and genetics and how programming is used to help solve current-day problems in those fields. Specifically this assignment looks at skin type, type-2 diabetes, exercise and diet. It includes references to a website with a diagram showing how the genotypes for exercise and diet interrelate and students need to develop code to implement the diagram. Learning objectives include: command-line arguments, data structure (python dictionary), if-else, loops, file input, writing user-defined functions.

The author of this material was awarded a 2016 NCWIT Engagement Excellence Award for this assignment. Learn more about the award on the NCWIT awards page.