Ideas for Recreational Computer Programming?

September 6, 2007 10:06 AM

Please point me to sources (books or websites) of ideas for recreational programming projects which would be suitable for bright high schoolers and undergraduates. Ideally, the projects would explore topics in math, science or computing and could each be completed in anywhere from one day to a week.

I would love to find something like The Computational Beauty of Nature or the collections of A.K. Dewdney's Computer Recreations columns. Diversity of topics is a plus, but my searches haven't been too fruitful so any help is appreciated.

posted by steadystate to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

I really like why's Hackety Hack for starting off programming. He also wrote a fun guide book (the Poignant Guide) for learning some ruby programming. This might be a little too low-level for your students, but I got a kick out of it. Hackety Hack starts out with a very basic tour of Ruby and provides an interesting interface for creating small Ruby utilities, which includes a very conversational framework that is easy for beginners to understand. You might have your students go through the basic tutorial and then create a more complex application.
posted by bernsno at 10:22 AM on September 6, 2007 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Have a look at Project Euler.
posted by parudox at 11:24 AM on September 6, 2007