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This program is tentative and subject to change.

Sat 1 Mar 2025 13:45 - 13:57 at Meeting Rooms 302-303 - Nifty Assignments

Debugging is a crucial skill for any new programmer to learn. Writing AND debugging code can be too challenging for students, so this assignment seeks to make the debugger more approachable by using it in a terminal-based debugging game. The “game” is a simulation of a Clue-style Murder Mystery story, which is thoroughly randomized based on each student’s login ID. The MurderMystery driver will run the simulation, and then ask students a series of questions about the events of the simulation. Students can answer these via the terminal, and then submit the auto-generated Answers file to be auto-graded by the GameResults auto-grader. The questions range in type and scope, requiring anything from a normal breakpoint to four conditional breakpoints to answer. The students must use the variable viewer in the debugger to inspect nested object structures and access certain coordinates of 2D arrays to find answers. Since each student’s mystery is randomized, it required a slightly different approach for everyone, while still sharing similar tactics. By introducing the debugger in this way, students can approach the task as a game to be solved, with lower stakes than if they were trying to fix their own code. While also allowing them to gain much familiarity with the debugger, boolean conditions, simple object structures, and more.

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Sat 1 Mar

Displayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change

13:45 - 15:00
13:45
12m
Talk
Murder Mystery
Nifty Assignments
Colin Sullivan Rutgers University, Steven Chen Rutgers University, Ana Paula Centeno Rutgers University
13:57
12m
Talk
Augmentative and Alternative Communication Device Maps Assignment
Nifty Assignments
Catherine Baker Creighton University, Yasmine Elglaly Western Washington University, Kristen Shinohara School of Information
14:10
12m
Talk
Nifty Assignments: Particle Systems
Nifty Assignments
Keith Schwarz Stanford University
14:22
12m
Talk
Building The Tree of Life from Scratch
Nifty Assignments
Christopher Tralie Ursinus College
14:35
12m
Talk
Music Visualizer
Nifty Assignments
Kevin Wayne Princeton University
14:47
12m
Talk
Infinite Story
Nifty Assignments
Chris Piech Stanford University, Mehran Sahami Stanford University and ACM Taskforce, Yasmine Alonso Stanford University, Katie Liu Stanford University, Javokhir Arifov Stanford University, Anjali Sreenivas Stanford University, Dan Webber Stanford University, Tina Zheng Stanford University, Ngoc Nguyen Stanford University, Iddah Mlauzi Stanford University, Juliette Woodrow Stanford University