Image analysis: a group assignment in programming with breadth

Problems based on material already familiar to students have some advantage in allowing depth of coverage of computer programming topics. However it is sometimes necessary to force students to cover a wide variety of topics in programming, and it may be necessary or expedient to introduce a problem topic that is unfamiliar to the students to accomplish this. To that end, a problem was utilized in a freshman engineering honors course at Purdue University with applications to printing and robot vision, with a title designed to grab the attention of the students in the classes-"Image Analysis: Halftoning by Grayscale Histogram Thresholding and Edge Detection by Laplacian Convolution". Students were expected to learn a great deal of material, all of which was needed for timely project completion, with coverage provided through regular lectures or supplemental class meetings. The problem to be solved was sufficiently complex that the four-person teams reported little difficulty in splitting up the work so that every team member had sufficient work to do. In spite of the complexity of the assignment, the overwhelming voice heard from the students at semester's end was that they developed incredible amounts of programming skill from the project, and that it definitely should be kept in the course in the future. However, the project may be just a bit ambitious.