Nifty Assignments Info

The Nifty Assignments project attempts to gather together great CS assignments to make their ideas and materials freely available for the CS-education community. This page gives some background on Nifty Assignments and explains how to apply for Nifty Assignments.

Applications are due a little before the regular SIGCSE paper date. For Nifty 2013, submissions are due Sep 4th. Feel free to email Nick Parlante if you have any questions (try to include "nifty" in the subject).

Where Did Nifty Assignments Come From?

At the SIGCSE conference, I would often see a neat assignment idea go by as a peripheral part of a talk. Knowing that great assignments are such a tricky and time-consuming part of putting together a course, it was natural to create a forum focused on the very practical problem of finding the best assignments within the CSE community and making their materials freely available.

What Makes A Nifty Assignment?

Over the years, Nifty Assignments have spanned quite a range. Nonetheless, here's my attempt to distill some of the features that make a Nifty Assignment...

Nifty -- the Nifty Assignments often have a playful sort of "fun factor" to them. They are very visual, or they build a game, or they have entertaining output. The assignments invite the students to play around with the material. Of course we shouldn't regard this as a requirement. Not all CS fits into the "game with blinking lights" motif.
Topical -- most Nifty Assignments fit into the curriculum and difficulty range that makes sense for most schools (typically CS0-CS2). This is just a practical bias, where we want to promote assignments that can work for the greatest number of students. Platform independence is also desirable, and we try to avoid dependencies on non-portable or non-standard libraries. At present, Java is a great language to make your Nifty Assignment adoptable by the widest audience.
Scalable -- many Nifty Assignments operate at two levels. First and most importantly, there's the mainstream part of the assignment that is nifty, meaningful, and effective for the average student. Beyond that, many Nifty Assignments have an open-ended aspect where advanced students can take the assignment beyond its original boundaries.
Adoptable -- for an ideal Nifty Assignment, the author has put together materials that make the assignment easy for another instructor to adopt: handouts (.rtf, .doc, or .html formats), starter source code, data files, and other ancillary materials. Here again, platform independence, use of open, vendor-neutral languages, libraries, etc., is a plus. Although it lacks glamor, I have grown to appreciate the value of high-quality materials. It's easy to think of Tic-Tac-Toe or whatever as an assignment, but there's a big gap between the idea and having all the materials tested and ready to go. In this way, Nifty Assignments can complete that last step for the community, making the idea concretely available for the whole community.
Inspirational and thought provoking -- sometimes a Nifty assignment is just thought provoking about what is possible in an assignment ... inspiring people to work out their own assignments more than being something a lot of people adopt.

These are just tendencies, not hard and fast rules, and there are great Nifty Assignments that go against one or more of them. All that really matters is that it's a great assignment that will be of interest to other instructors. Also, Nifty Assignments do not necessarily need to be large or complex. A project might just do one thing well, such as David Levine's Sorting Detective or Julie Zelenski's Quilt/Drawing program. They address a problem of interest to many courses, and their small focus makes them all the easier to adopt.

Nifty Assignment Materials

For each Nifty Assignment there is a short blurb in the bulletin, a 20 minute talk given at the SIG-CSE, and finally a web page, (available from http://nifty.stanford.edu/) that contains assignment material ready for study or adoption. For each assignment, there is material from the assignment itself -- things an instructor can use to study or adopt the assignment...

The assignment handout (RTF or PDF or HTML)
Sample data files
Starter and support code files
Model grading criteria
A runnable demo application

Not all of the above is required; sometimes there's just a handout, and that's enough for an interested instructor to get the idea. In general, we have not provided solution code on the site, although it may be available from each author. (Someday we could put together a more formal solution-code clearinghouse.)

For example, my 1999 assignment, Darwin's World, is pretty thin on material: just a handout, some data files, and some meta-writeup. My 2001 Assignment, Tetris, goes to the other extreme: there's starter and support code files, a handout, a sample application, an architectural overview, and a meta-writeup. Many of you may remember Julie Zelenski's 1999 assignment, the Random Sentence Generator, which has a hilarious online version (all of these nifty assignments are linked off http://nifty.stanford.edu/).

Meta Information

We collect meta-information about each assignment to help instructors understand where each assignment fits...

What is so great about this assignment?
What niche/student is it suited for (CS1, CS2, advanced, easy, ...)?
What does it teach?
How hard is it?
How long does it take?
What does it depend on?
What are its strengths and weaknesses?
Are there any lessons on assignment craft in general that can be drawn from the assignment?

This information helps people sift through the many assignment. I want to do a better job of emphasizing meta information in the submissions. I think that people are so accustomed to writing up their assignments for students, it's hard to shift gears and add the information of interest to other instructors. To help things along, we're using the table format below to help call-out the meta information in a standard way. Here's an example using the old Random Sentence Generator assignment...

Summary	Random Sentence Generator -- build a sort of grammar structure in memory -- lots of uses of pointers, collections, and hashing. Then use a simple recursion over that structure to generate random output.
Topics	A neat application of recursion and pointer-intensive data structures.
Audience	Appropriate for CS2 or a later course.
Difficulty	This is an intermediate to advanced assignment, taking 1 or 2 weeks for a CS2 student.
Strengths	The great strength of this assignment is that the grammars and their output can be quite funny. Also, the data structure and the recursion are moderately complex but neat. Students like this assignment.
Weaknesses	Some parsing is required to build the grammar, which is not that fun. Also, this is not a concise, focused pointer/recursion problem. It has more heft to it.
Dependencies	Requires and understanding of pointers, recursion, and enough sophistication to deal with a data structure with 2 or 3 layers to it. Works fine in many languages. Hashing may or may not be used. The data structure has a natural map/collection structure, so using library classes can make it easier.
Variants	Because there are quite a few collections in the RSG, we have used it as a nice driver for students to implement their own collection that is instantiated in several places to build the RSG.

How to Apply for Nifty Assignments

To apply for Nifty Assignments, we want to see a draft of what the web page for your assignment would look like. We're interested in the assignment and its materials, and the above meta information of what the assignment is good at and where it fits in the curriculum. To apply for Nifty Assignments, these things don't need to be in final form -- just roughed out enough that we can get good sense of the assignment. Or put another way, most of the judging is based on the assignment idea. That said of course a more polished package always looks better.

Put together a prototype version of what your Nifty Assignments web page would look like. Create a directory with your name and the name of the assignment (e.g. "Parlante-NameSurfer") containing an index.html that describes your assignment, its structure, how it works. (Naming note: avoid pun/misspelling type names for your project. You want a name such that when someond does a google search with a couple words they remember, they get your nifty page.) Please put the above meta-information table near the top of the index.html, and you can add more information below. Add supporting materials to the directory and link them from your index: handouts, sample applications, etc.. Please use relative links, so we can move the directory around and it all still works. It is not required that your directory be in final form to apply. The reviewers are evaluating the quality of the assignment itself and its applicability to the CSE community, not the details of the presentation at this stage.

Create a .zip archive of your directory and email it to nick.parlante@cs.stanford.edu with 'nifty' in the subject line. I will email back a short confirmation that your application has been received within a couple days, and we can deal with any file snafus at that time. Applications are reviewed by previous Nifty Assignments presenters.

If accepted, you will need to...

Finalize your assignment page and its various materials
Prepare a very short blurb for the proceedings
Attend SIG-CSE to give your talk at the panel session
Your materials will be widely distributed for free on the web (although you may retain copyright), so you will need to be comfortable with that

If you've got a nifty assignment, we'd love to hear from you!

Best regards,

Nick

FAQ

Q: Does my assignment need to be a gigantic production?
A: No. Small ideas can work very nicely -- for example Julie Zelenski's Quilt or David Levine's Sort Detective. The gigantic assignments make spectacular demos, but small assignments are actually easier for other instructors to adopt.

Q: Do I need to have all the assignment materials done and in final form when I apply?
A: No. You want to have enough material in decent shape that the reviewers can evaluate the assignment. The reviewers focus on the quality of the assignment itself and its applicability to the CSE community, not the the details of the presentation at this stage. If your assignment is accepted, then you can start worrying.

Q: Is it required that this assignment has never been published before?
A: No. This is not a formal policy exactly; it's just what we've done. We have published assignments that had appeared in earlier CSE talks or papers. The justification being that we put the assignment before a wider audience and (compared to appearing as a side-point in a paper), we make the assignment files, handouts, etc. available in a uniform way. However, we do avoid publishing assignments that are too similar to previous Nifty assignments.

Q: Do I need to be a Nobel laureate like Julie Zelenski or a super-model like Owen Astrachan to apply for this?
A: No. Nifty Panelists are reassuringly ordinary academics. Their bizarre energy in the panel itself is due to the special Nifty Shakes we get at Starbucks. That, or something to do with Dan Garcia. Seriously, you just need to be an instructor who has given an assignment, where that assignment worked very well, and now you are ready to write it up and share it.

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