From: Josh Cheek <josh.cheek@...>
Date: 2010-04-10T04:26:13+09:00
Subject: Need a short nontrivial example program

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I'm a member of the ACM at my university (Wichita State), and we are allowed
to participate in the College of Engineering's open house. We decided to do
an arduino project b/c it seemed like the kind of thing that would be
accessible to engineers.

A while back, I read
http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/2009/09/03/red-light-green-light and
loved the idea. So we decided to create a traffic light controlled by the
Arduino, which receives commands from a test suite like RSpec, that reflect
the status of the tests.

But how to show this off to the engineers?

Ruby is easy to learn, and with a good prebuilt test suite offering helpful
explanations of why it failed, and what you might do to make it not fail, I
think that I could sit a reasonably capable person down and have them write
a program.

So I am looking for ideas about what this program should be. I want it to be
nontrivial, because I want them to walk away thinking "holy crap, I just did
something cool that I could see myself using at some point in the future".
And I want it to be short so that a number of people can give it a try.

For example, I really love the TweetStream example program (
http://github.com/intridea/tweetstream/blob/master/examples/growl_daemon.rb),
where you can have your Mac growl at you every time someone makes a tweet
with a given keyword. But I think most engineers here don't have macs so
will be harder to appreciate this. Plus, I'm not sure how to test some of
that stuff, and to see it in action, you would kind of have to spam your
twitter account.

Anyway, looking for ideas.
-Josh

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