Nifty Assignments Spelling Bee + Wordle Eric Roberts and Jed Rembold, Willamette University

This Nifty Assignment submission began as the SpellingBee project, in which students solve a word puzzle that a reasonably popular game published by the The New York Times. In the months before SIGCSE 2022, Spelling Bee was eclipsed on the Times site by Wordle, and we decided to change our assignment to catch this wave of popularity. This site therefore offers links to both the Spelling Bee and Wordle assignments.

What makes these projects nifty?

• They fit well into a CS1 course once students have covered strings, lists, and files.
• Both projects decompose nicely into milestones that build on each other.
• They afford interesting extensions for students who are progressing quickly.
• Students build a graphical application without having to learn a complex package.
• Students get to build an applications that has had tangible commercial success (Josh Wardle sold Wordle to the Times for “an undisclosed sum in the low seven figures”).
• Implementations exist for both Java and Python.
• The web-based demos reveal none of the implementation details.