hehe, now we'll know for sure if someone wants the monks to do their homework for them :) Go the whole hog and give them the Knight's Tour.

I did my own plaintext Minesweeper once, which is a nice project because is has input, output, objects, arrays and recursion in one package. Teach a principle and get them to implement it themselves as you go along. You could also introduce modules with something like Curses or even TK for extra credit.

Or go really hardcore and introduce them to threads with the dining philosophers (which I must confess to not to comletely mastering at uni).