In this CS2 assignment, students use a linked list to implement a particle system, a collection of graphical particles that move around the screen. Each particle has its own color, position, and velocity. By creating and moving thousands of particles, students can build scenes like a water fountain, an erupting volcano, a snowy day, a fireworks show, etc.

This CS2 assignment asks students to implement a literal flood fill. Students are given a terrain containing bodies of water, then write a flood fill algorithm to determine what parts of the terrain will be under water as sea levels rise. Our provided starter files include terrains from around the world and allow students to explore how coastal areas will be impacted by differing amounts of sea level rise. The underlying model is very simple - students see the terrain as a 2D array of real numbers representing heights in meters, and water can flow in each of the four cardinal directions. The resulting images give a striking sense of how coastal areas may be impacted by climate change.

The Nifty Assignments special session is about promoting and sharing the ideas and ready-to-use materials of successful assignments.

The Nifty Assignments special session is 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 the assignment. A key part of Nifty Assignments is the mundane but vital role of distributing the materials - handouts, data files, starter code, rubrics, autograders - that make each assignment ready to adopt. Each assignment presented has complete materials freely available on the Nifty Assignments home page nifty.stanford.edu. 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.

For several decades, instructors who focus on introductory computer science courses have recognized the value of graphical examples. Supporting a graphics library that is appropriate for beginning students has become more difficult over time. This paper describes a new approach to building a graphics library that allows for multiple source languages and a wide range of target architectures and platforms. The key to this approach is using an interprocess pipe to communicate between a platform independent client library and a Java based process to perform the graphical operations specific to each platform.

I worry over topics for the syllabus, fretting over demos and presentations. And yet, I always come back to the fact that most of what my students learn and remember from my course comes from the assignments. Great assignments are hard to dream up and time-consuming to develop. With that in mind, the Nifty Assignments session is all about promoting and sharing the ideas and concrete materials of successful assignments.