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I will share the results on a future post. I understand your point, but I think the assignment will enhance their skills related to objects, classes, methods and instantiation.

That's my goal, not teaching about compilers or language structure. About that they will learn empirically.

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Yup! And I didn't mean to sound so negative (sorry). I do hope it works (and want to hear about it when it does!). I've definitely gotten really excited about assignments before when I thought they were neat and that the students ought to be able to figure everything out---but which turned out to be just a bit too hard and thus demoralising rather than empowering. (If that happens, it's still not worth dropping---tweak it until it works. Once you get it working, there's probably a SIGCSE or ITiCSE paper in it for you!)

No problem :)

I really got your point now. I thought about the "demoralising X empowering" and my solution for that was to work with pairs of students. Working as a team, they can discuss and motivate each other.

When I blog about the results, I will highlight the number of pairs that completed, partially completed and did not complete the assignment.

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