Periodically in my work or during writing this blog I come across computational problems that have the aspects of making, at least in my mind, very good teaching problems. Some of the characteristics are that the basic problem is relatively simple to explain, the skills required are reusable on other problems, the concepts are germane to other problems and that the posed problem can be expanded in steps to something much richer. Such problems might even be the nucleus of undergraduate or even high school bioinformatics projects, though with the recent news of
a high schooler sequencing his dead pet angelfish's genome the bar for high school projects has leapt a few notches! In contrast to a programming problem that doesn't fit these, I'm going to tag such posts as "Better than FizzBuzz".
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