To be honest the student may not necessarily care what the Isling model is, but they don't have to and neither does an LLM. It takes a very modest amount of code to apply some rules and update a grid of pixels. At least when I was in school it was totally normal to expect students to make something like this in an hour.

It's actually kind of ironic that in this case such a simple project now means the opposite of what it did back then. Students got these assignments as a form of encouragement to show that their skills were immediately useful and that more "serious" science need not be so scary.