Student Projects

Autumn always makes me feel like I ought to be back in school, either to learn or to teach. In turn, that makes me think about student projects I would like to run.

Tools

Bram

Bram (“Bram runs agents mindfully”) is a desktop app that embeds Claude Code and Codex in a GUI that provides structured, audited workflows. This project will add several new features, including support for other families of models such as DeepSeek.

A Little WYSIWYG Editor

Web Browser Engineering builds a small but fully functional web browser step by step to show students how real ones work. The aim of this project is to build an equally simple desktop WYSIWYG editor in Python that supports both styled text and embedded sketching.

A Little Program Verifier

Where the previous project would build a simple editor, this project would build a verifier for a very simple programming language in order to teach people how those tools work. (See here for preliminary work.)

XKCD Charts

Chart.xkcd creates charts in the hand-drawn style of XKCD. This project will fix outstanding issues, add new features such as axis limits and stable coloring schemes, and create wrappers in one or both of Gleam or Dafny.

Distributed Systems Simulators

Software Design by Example in Python deliberately ignored concurrency, partial failure, and everything else associated with modern distributed applications. The draft appendices are fixing that by building scale models of distributed protocols and systems from TCP to BitTorrent and load-balancing tools using asimpy; this project will fill those in and extend them.

An I/O Library for Dafny

I want to translate Software Design by Example in Python into Dafny to see and show how verifiability changes the way we build software tools, but Dafny’s I/O and systems programming libraries don’t offer what the examples need. This project will build those libraries, starting with what’s listed in this blog post.

Games

Rewind

A first-person shooter with a science-fiction theme in which each player has a limited “temporal battery” that can be spent to reverse the flow of time by a few seconds. If you just got shot, rewind and take cover instead; if you missed a shot, rewind and aim lower. The twist is that your opponent knows you can do this, turning every rewind into a battle of wits.

Save the Humans!

The zombies have attacked. The people at the zoo have panicked, and it’s up to the animals to save them in this tongue-in-cheek game. The tiger can chase people away from danger, but they might run straight into the arms of the ravenous horde. The bunny is so cute that people will chase it, but if they catch it they’ll just stand there petting it until they’re eaten, and so on.

Tower Support Game

A tower defense game is one in which the player builds fixed defenses against incoming waves of attackers. The objective of this game is to prototype a simple tower support game, in which the player builds bridges, first aid stations, and so on to help travelers reach their destination.