That matches a lot of my experience. I created a bunch of those lines floating on the screen which never failed to impress classmates who didn't frequent the co

That matches a lot of my experience. I created a bunch of those lines floating on the screen which never failed to impress classmates who didn't frequent the computer lab and were stuck doing "write a program to calculate compound interest". My neatest trick at that point was to make a 'fake' pre-loader where the progress bar showed a fake percentage with a cool graphic. My next 'impress project' was build a menu in QBasic where you could use the arrow keys on the keyboard to graphically move the highlighter on a menu. Almost everyone else at that time was doing menu selection pressing the number of the menu item. At that point I thought of it myself since there wasn't any internet in our lab so I still feel really good about it :) It also got me a spot on our school programming team primarily because no one else did the menu as quickly as I could then. I'd like to think that I'm an interaction designer today partly because of the feedback and enjoyment I got out of doing projects like that.