Yesterday was selection Sunday and the NCAA announced the teams entering the 2017 basketball championships. So of course I thought about programming projects. I mean there is data and something a lot of my students are interested in so it is a natural. Now there are already all sorts of automated bracket generating tools on the Internet. LOTS of them. But being me I needed my own.
The first thing I did was build a data file. (NCAA 2017 seeding information) That link gets the comma separated data file. It looks in part like this:
It’s pretty basic with the seeding number, the university name and for most of them their record. Once I had that I could write a program to read in the data and display it. My next step was to write code to semi randomly (its weighted by seeding) pick which team went to each next step of the competition. I get graphic so I generated the following:
I’m thinking I could let students do something more simple in output. I did this with parallel arrays but I can see creating a class making some things easier. In any case I get to p[lay with reading and parsing data, building and processing arrays, and other data manipulation. There are many variations I could do here.
Students could create their own schemes for generating brackets. Or they could write code that lets the user select which teams would advance. I’m open to other suggestions as well. What sort of project would you assign with this data?
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