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Instructors have struggled to generate good programming assignments for the CS1 course. In attempting to deal with this issue ourselves, we have generated two real-world programming assignments that can be solved by most students yet generate challenges for advanced students. We present our overall criteria for a quality programming assignment in CS1, details of the two example assignments, and other issues stemming from the generation and management of these assignments.
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Stevenson et al. (2006) studied this question.
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