This is the kind of thing project-based courses ought to train programmers to expect: Yeah, you're a legitimately good programmer, but programming mostly comes

This is the kind of thing project-based courses ought to train programmers to expect: Yeah, you're a legitimately good programmer, but programming mostly comes down to solving other peoples' problems, so you can't rest on your laurels. There's a whole, wide world out there of companies that need bespoke software, and most of the actual effort in writing that code is ensuring it properly enforces the business logic of a business you know nothing about. Therefore, in this project you'll be helping a professor from some non-CS department write educational software. You have to balance accessibility with pedagogical accuracy, as guided by someone who doesn't secretly know that some specific algorithm is the magic key to solving the problem.