Incorporating a semester-long project into the CS 2 course

At our school students are generally assigned about six programming projects for the computer science 2 (CS 2) course. These assignments are mainly designed to complement the laboratory work and provide practical applications of the lecture topics. However, the assignments are often unrelated to each other. We believe that students should also be exposed to writing larger programs in which they have to do complete design and choose appropriate data structures for their project. This also allows them to learn how a larger program should be managed. In this paper we present our experience of applying a semester-long real-world programming project to the CS2 course. The content and objectives of this project are also discussed. In addition to writing about four traditional small programs, students also have to write a large program for the semester-long project. For this project, students are required to apply software engineering principles including analysis, design, implementation, testing, debugging, and maintenance. The benefits of this approach to students are also discussed.