Educational project ideas

Question

I really need any programming project idea to implement (any language) that fits as an educational project.

I'm the leader of a small programming team in a community aiming at teaching, so I need to use this project as a way of teaching them different stuff about programming and different techniques. But I can't think of any project that fits this purpose.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Have a look at some of the projects on a site like http://www.elance.com/

Answer 2

Since we recently had an election (here in the US), how about an electronic voting system? This would explore databases, network communication, security, and usability. And would certainly drive home some points about accuracy, too!

Answer 3

Try a simple chat program with some basic socket programming, usually grabs the interest of young programmers when they can see it transmit text between computers.

Answer 4

Build a blogging system, this gives you alot to work with:
OOP vs. non-OOP
DataBase including injections
Spam Filtering Techniques services like akismet, adds API access, and building their own system
Javascript/AJAX you can take this as far as you'd like
XSS
Seperation of display/functionality code
Search
Among others.

And most of these things are fairly language agnostic, they are principals that will apply to every language (with the exception of the JavaScript/AJAX), on every platform be it LAMP WAMP WIMP SUN.

Answer 5

I've always wanted to write an information system to run a school. A web-based application which manages students, staff (teaching and administration), timetables, supervisions, enrolments, etc.

The challenge is designing it so as to allow it to be used by many different schools which would operate with differing policies, etc.

If that sounds too big, you could write one piece of the functionality of such a system.

Answer 6

I remember reading an article about implementing "Animals" game as a way to study a new language - it was written there, that said implementation would cover many aspect of the language you're learning.

Answer 7

For a Senior Project, a group of us made a rudimentary DirectX graphics engine - this might be good if you're targeting people with some programming experience. It could help teach memory/resource management, different data structures, as well as vector/matrix math. Have fun!

Answer 8

A 2D graph plotter
I made this as one of my very first programming projects.
The basics are very simple - only need to be able to draw pixels and lines and input coefficients for pre-programmed formulas, say for linear and cube equations.
Later you can add more and more features, up to making it a full plotter that can parse any formula.
This project also the advantages of correlating to something else the students may be studing and showing them nice graphical results.

Answer 9

I've always thought that attempting to implement a pop culture domain gets people into the problem space without having to not only learning to code, but a problem domain that they don't even care about.

Here are some examples:

• Write an American Idol Simulation
• Make a poker game
• Music library

Answer 10

Here's a couple of ideas to mull over:

• Write an IRC Client: This is something I've wanted to do for ages now and pretty soon I'll get on with it.
• Airline/Hotel Reservation System: There's nothing like building a booking system.
• Write a simple game: A couple of months I wrote Frogger in Java and I learned a lot from the experience, especially in handling Graphics.
• MP3 Renaming Tool: Thus is actually a personal project of mine right now. Write a tool that takes the ID3 tags and renames the MP3 file in a given format (i.e. Cheap Trick - Surrender.mp3).
• Credit Card Validator: A great way of finding out how checksums are used.
• Code an add-on for a popular script/program: I actually got started by developing 'hacks' for the vBulletin 2 forum script. An article system and two ID graphic hacks later I found myself to be pretty competent with PHP.

Answer 11

i want some different ideas to run university and i also want some different ideas of marketing of the university