A Musikalisches Würfelspiel (musical dice game) is a process for generating music by concatenating a random sequence of precomposed musical fragments. In this assignment, students “compose” a Viennese waltz in the style of Mozart by playing a sequence of 32 sound files that are chosen at random (from a library of 272) according to the results of throwing dice. It is a captivating demonstration not only of the power of randomness but also of how much can be accomplished by combining a simple idea with a tiny bit of code.

This work champions a new genre of programming assignment that is characterized by playing a sequence of sound files (analogous to printing a sequence of strings, but more engaging!) In this assignment, the sound files are precomposed fragments from classical music. Following this blueprint, the author has developed several other novel assignments in which the sound files are musical notes, speech, and ringtones. We hope that this work will inspire other teachers to craft new assignments in this style.

Kevin Wayne is the Phillip Y. Goldman University Lecturer in Computer Science at Princeton University, where he has been teaching since 1998. He has co-developed (with Robert Sedgewick) two of the most popular courses at Princeton (COS 126 and COS 226); co-authored several award-winning textbooks for students and practitioners; co-designed four free MOOCs on Coursera, with over 2 million enrolled students; and authored or co-authored seven nifty assignments. He directs a summer program aimed at broadening participation in computer science by historically under-represented groups. He was named a Distinguished Educator by the ACM in 2014.