It occurs to me, reading your comment, that an interesting exercise for a software development school program would be to assign a project for first-year students; then, in second year, assign the students to take the same project from the previous year and modify it.
One problem with that is that you tend to penalize students who didn't do well the first time, and you also make it more difficult to grade because it's not an independent measurement of their progress in a particular class.
Agreed. I feel like the biggest problem with these sorts of assignments for students is that most students are still learning to program - so by the time you "add on" to your first assignment, a lot of them will want/need to re-write it.
That's kind of the point: the assignment is to take an existing codebase (probably a crappy one), figure it out (who remembers what they were thinking a year ago?), and add to it without breaking it.
So then you give every student the same existing codebase (along with the same set of requirements), and as a bonus this helps them learn and adapt something written by a different person.
Saying: "Use the same thing you worked on last quarter" dooms everyone who made wrong foundational choices with their old project to spend most of their time "fighting the last war".
"Saying: "Use the same thing you worked on last quarter" dooms everyone who made wrong foundational choices with their old project to spend most of their time "fighting the last war"."
Not unless you told them before they started the previous year's project that it'll be used further along the line.
I'd just make it one really long subject that spans 3/4 years.
I actually discussed this idea with professors at my university, but the general consensus was that it was too ambitious/complicated to work into the current system.
