Using statistics from the US Open Tennis Tournament, students create a program in Python that asks a user enter eight distinct numbers related to an individual tennis player. The program then uses those numbers to compute and report three statistics in order: number of serves attempted, double fault percentage, and ace percentage.

In this project, students are asked to examine the cost of modifications done to a car and the impact on its fuel efficiency. Using python, students use certain functions such as number of miles driven per year, current mpg, cost (in dollars) of a gallon of gasoline, cost of the modification, and percent increase in mpg after the modification, in order to determine how long it will take the owner of the car to recoup their investment.

This assignment introduces the concepts of bio-computation and genetics and how programming is used to help solve current-day problems in those fields. Specifically this assignment looks at skin type, type-2 diabetes, exercise and diet. It includes references to a website with a diagram showing how the genotypes for exercise and diet interrelate and students need to develop code to implement the diagram. Learning objectives include: command-line arguments, data structure (python dictionary), if-else, loops, file input, writing user-defined functions.

The author of this material was awarded a 2016 NCWIT Engagement Excellence Award for this assignment. Learn more about the award on the NCWIT awards page.

This programming assignment requires students to consider a collection of Old English poetry and prose texts and consider the conjecture if any words appear only in the poetry (throughout the entire corpus)? And if so, how many times do these words occur? Students use a Python dictionary (also called a “hash table” or “map”) to keep track of all words in the poetry and then remove words from that dictionary that appear in the prose. Learning goals include problem decomposition (functions), extending existing code, technical writing, and writing scripts to produce HTML output.

The author of this material was awarded a 2016 NCWIT Engagement Excellence Award for this assignment. Learn more on NCWIT's awards page.

This Python programming assignment requires students to seek evidence to help answer the following conjecture: True or False? Tolkien wanted his readers to fully appreciate that his elves were large, thus he used the word “tall” (or other variants such as “big”, “giant”, “large”, etc.) in close proximity to the name of an elf (e.g., “Legolas”, “Galadriel” or even the generic word, “elf”). Learning goals include problem decomposition (functions), extending existing code, technical writing, building an app to handle a wide range of input texts, and writing scripts to produce Excel-ready (comma-separated value) output.

This assignment requires students to write regular expressions (regex) to match patterns in words that solve word puzzles. A number of the puzzles are taken from WIll Shortz' books (1996, 2003). Shortz is National Public Radio's (NPR) puzzle master. This assignment is a stand-alone exercise for practice with the powerful pattern-matching syntax of regular expressions. The assignment involves no programming. A web-based CGI compares student regex with a dictionary of words and returns a table of resulting word matches. A "starter kit" includes a series of word puzzles to encourage regex play.

The author of this material was awarded a 2016 NCWIT Engagement Excellence Award for this assignment. Learn more on NCWIT's awards page.

This programming assignment requires students to study, understand, and augment a Python program that (re)writes or “breaks” poems in various “deformed” manners, including printing the lines of a poem in reverse (last line to first line) and with randomized lines. Emily Dickinson wrote in the margins of a book: 'Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you?’ Learning goals include problem decomposition (functions), extending existing code, problem solving with multiple solutions, and building an app to handle a wide range of input texts.

The author of this material was awarded a 2016 NCWIT Engagement Excellence Award for this assignment. Learn more on NCWIT's awards page.

This is the first of five assignments in a semester-long CS-1-like course named Computing for Poets to introduce students to programming within one area of the digital humanities: the application of computing to the study of digitized texts. Here, students must build a small website with answers to two queries applied to and the results obtained from Google’s Ngram Viewer. The course leverages a MOOC for HTML/CSS/Javascript practice to maximize in-class, hands-on sessions. Students will return to HTML in the final assignment in this series when their Python scripts will produce web pages on the go.

This is the last of five programming assignments in a semester-long CS-1-like course named DNA to introduce students to programming within the context of genomics: the analysis of DNA within a single cell of an organism. Originally, the course targeted students in the life sciences but it now attracts students across the academy. The goal of these assignments is to prepare students to obtain enough confidence with scripting and associated scientific write-ups to conduct a small computational experiment in a final project.

This programming assignment requests a Python program to generate a report that serves as a preliminary study to compare and contrast certain features of sequences between multiple organisms. Comparative genomics is the analysis and comparison of genomes from different species. This assignment focuses on “genomic signature” to help infer if a region of DNA is “like” other regions of DNA. The genomic signature refers to the “characteristic frequency of oligonucleotides (e.g., motifs of length 4 bp are referred to as tetramers) in a genome or sequence. It has been observed that the genomic signature of phylogenetically related genomes is similar.

This is the fourth of five programming assignments in a semester-long CS-1-like course named DNA to introduce students to programming within the context of genomics: the analysis of DNA within a single cell of an organism. Originally, the course targeted students in the life sciences but it now attracts students across the academy. The goal of these assignments is to prepare students to obtain enough confidence with scripting and associated scientific write-ups to conduct a small computational experiment in a final project.

This programming assignment assumes that you have already located a specific gene (perhaps using some of the software written in the previous assignment) but now you want to investigate the regulatory DNA sequences “upstream” (just prior to or to the left of) that gene. Regulatory (or promoter) sequences in intergenic regions (between the genes) are vitally important in the process of protein production. Promoter motifs (DNA "words") often are repetitive and/or "fuzzy" (variable) DNA sequences upstream of genes. This assignment applies regular expressions to locate certain categories of repetitions (direct and mirror repeats).