Exciting things are happening at Generigloop, and the senior vice executive’s undersecretary needs help keeping things organized. They’ve asked you, their junior assistant, to create a tool for drawing organizational charts. Seizing the opportunity to impress—and learn valuable skills while getting paid—you volunteer to research what it will take to create a chart-drawing tool using Python and C#. You’ll learn techniques for drawing family trees, hierarchical component diagrams, document hierarchies, and other tree structures.

The shortest distance between two points…is the most cost-effective. You’re the fleet manager at APS (Acme Parcel Service), a company whose fleet of thousands of trucks drives more than 10 million miles per year. Your goal is to write a program that finds the shortest path between stops, shaving a few percent off the total mileage—and scoring points with your CEO. You’ll learn to store networks in files, draw networks in WPF, test your networks, select start and end nodes, and find the shortest path between them using shortest path algorithms.

Enter the realm of project management: your job is to oversee the construction of a castle, ensuring that the project is completed on time. Many of the tasks in the schedule are dependent on other tasks, and some will inevitably fail to be done by their due dates, risking the delay of the entire project—and the wrath of the Evil Overlord. To prevent this catastrophe, you’ll perform topological sorting to determine which tasks can be scheduled, use the critical path method to find out which tasks will be delayed by the delay of another task, and build PERT and Gantt charts to see critical paths and task dependencies in a visual way.

A picture says a thousand words, but make sure they’re the right ones. Today’s cell phones come with amazing digital cameras, but without a guarantee that you’ll never take another bad picture. Learn to use image processing algorithms, geometry, point operations, and filters to transform images by adjusting brightness, contrast, color, size, and shape. You’ll also create interesting effects such as highlighting edges, embossing, and blurring.

Maximize productivity with maximum flow algorithms and some basic C# programming. You play the role of a nuclear power plant operations manager. Your challenge is to assign jobs to your group of employees, and your goal is to achieve maximum productivity. You’ll build a program that generates networks for testing maximal flow algorithms, as well as a program that finds maximal flows through a network of capabilities. Then, you’ll put your maximal flow program to work to match employees with jobs while ensuring that as many jobs as possible are completed.

Take a trip into the fascinating world of fractals! Here, you’re an art director for a documentary on the 1960s psychedelic movement. Your goal is to wow your audience with a mind-bending title image—a perfect application for fractals. You’ll build programs that create fractals by drawing lines recursively, create ghostly multi-dimensional shapes, and draw escape-time fractals using the Mandelbrot set (the most popular fractal in the world).