Next Semester, I am supposed to teach a short course in Haskell. Can anyone recommend interesting programming projects which can be completed in about a month? Thank you very much.
apart from "pure" programming exercise (see Haskell textbooks http://haskell.org/bookshelf/) here are a few suggestions in the area of experimental mathematics. also, check with your introductory discrete mathematics course (or equivalent). a lot of combinatorial problems on finite structures can be illustrated by finding (counter-)examples by computer. say Ramsey colorings, Monochromatic arithmetic subsequences (van der Waerden's theorem), words avoiding patterns, and so on. http://www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/~berstel/Lothaire/ChapitresACW/C3.ps next, perhaps some game theory? nim (and variants), other take-and-break games (octal games). you can safely ignore all of the Sprague-Grundy theory, and just define the game, and ask for some method to determine quickly who wins. or graph theory: finding hamiltonian paths (knights tours on a x b chessboards, for instance) if the students alreay took some computability theory, then a nice topic is Posts Correspondence Problem, see http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~zhao/PCP/intro.htm http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~pcp/pcpcontest_en.html also string rewriting: finding/avoiding loops. this (open!) problem is easily stated: http://www.lri.fr/~rtaloop/95.html hope this helps. I'm happy to provide more detail. -- -- Johannes Waldmann ---- http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~joe/ -- -- joe@informatik.uni-leipzig.de -- phone/fax (+49) 341 9732 204/252 --