The very first CS class I took in college was based on SICP (taught in Scheme, for reference). By this point, I had already been programming for a while, but th

The very first CS class I took in college was based on SICP (taught in Scheme, for reference). By this point, I had already been programming for a while, but there were plenty of students with very limited exposure to programming as well. One of the projects we had was writing a text-based RPG. This was to highlight the ideas behind OOP, which we learned after functional programming. Initially, the idea seemed to have merit--writing a game seemed to be a fun thing to do. However, I got quickly bogged down in boring detail; it turned out that writing a text based game has a lot of boring, repetitive work for each of the cool bits. It was the most tedious project in the class overall. The final project we did was implementing a Logo interpreter. This was completely different--the ratio of cool and insightful stuff to boring fiddly bits was much, much better. Also, unlike the text-based game, even a barely working final result felt brilliant. Being able to program in a language I had just implemented was magical. Playing a text-based game with a working engine but a poor story line did not measure up. So far, this has been my favorite course. However, I remember the text-based game as annoying and not particularly illuminating; it does not compare at all with the logo interpreter. Overall, I think that too much of a text-based game is repetitive and boring, and it relies too much on non-programming bits (the dialog, the setting, the story) to be consistently inspiring to a new programmer.