Wednesday, December 07, 2016

What’s Your Elf Name–A Programming Project

I love string manipulation projects. Maybe because I have always been more of a word person than a math person. Who knows why. I see them every where. For example this time of your one sees a lot of images like this one shared on social media.

bigelf

It’s a simple enough game.Pick one part of the name based on the first letter of your first name and the second from the month you were born. As a programming project it lets students use arrays and do some parsing work converting words selected into indexes into those arrays.

And of course is it seasonal so there is that. There are many variations of that sort of meme to be found. Recently I found the “what is your Sith Lord name?” meme.

 

whats-your-sith-name

I’m tempted to use this one before I have students test for palindromes next semester. A lot of thought goes into reversing strings for people new to programming. This one makes for a simpler project which can be a good thing.

But maybe you want to avoid the Sci Fi thing and it is not the Christmas season. How about spirit animals?

spirit animalSpiritAnimal

It turns out that a simple image search for “what is your name” (I used Bing for that link) turns up a plethora of examples. I was amazed at home many I found. There seems to be one for just about every season or holiday and many popular social interests. Something for everyone I think.

I’m still using the Shakespeare Insult Generator project though. That’s fun.

3 comments:

Mike Zamansky said...

What happens if one of your students actually is a Sith Lord? Do they not apply thed transformation?

Alfred Thompson said...

Actual Sith Lords do a separate project to determine their Jedi name.

Garth said...

I only have one student taking Python this semester. I gave him the Shakespeare Insults assignment. You know you have an over achiever when he is try to figure out how to get the a/an part of the sentence correct. He is now building a base converter. Should be interesting because I had to teach him the basics of bases today.