Bizare homework

[logicbug]

It's always fun to get a few laughs at the expense of your teachers.

Have you ever been assigned a piece of homework that was really strange or off the wall? Something that your teacher swears is increadibly useful and important, but you can't find a pratical use for?

Share your stories of bizare homework assignments! Let the games begin!
(Let's keep this java related)

[masijade]

I can only assume that you're still a student, but that your extensive real world programming experience qualifies you to classify the usefullness of the assignments.

P.S. Sorry, I don't mean to be mean, but ....

[logicbug]

Contraty to what you may think it has been many years since I sat in a class room. I know there are a lot of students here and thought it would be fun. There is no need to be rude.

[masijade]

Well, I did apologise, but now, I can only assume, that you were unable to see past the "surface operations" of the assignment and peer into what sort of technique was actually being taught.

It would then interest me, in light of that assumption, what assignment you found so bizarre.

[logicbug]

As I said, it has been many years since I sat in a class room. I remember that there were assignments that I found really bizare, but the details of which are long since forgotten.

[masijade]

Ahhh, so it based upon your feelings/insights as they were then, which, ipso facto, makes the first reply relevant again. ;-)

[logicbug]

Either way it could still be fun =P

[xcallmejudasx]

We had an ongoing project to design and build a calculator. Our first time he told us to use design a custom list class for storing LongIntegers, the second time he told us to scrap all that code and use Arrays. I asked if instead we could use an ArrayList because we had just designed a list so it seemed to fit better in with our "recently acquired" knowledge. He said no, his reasoning; "I know it can be done with ArrayList. I want to see you do it with Array" so we did it. The next week he said use ArrayList(which was what I had used the very first run through before I had to use my custom list class)

over a 3 month course the only thing that had been changed was how we stored all the digits of our LongInteger. We never had to implement a GUI system or complex operands or anything. Most of the class took it as a waste of time since we just back tracked around everything we already knew.