A great question came up at class last night.
Several years ago, I designed a system for faculty to post sample exam questions for students to study (you can read about 
duck here). For several years, I've heard students talking about how to "game" online quizzing systems. Physic, chemistry, and several other departments use a system called OWL which is designed to be on-line homework. I've heard students describe a variety of strategies designed to "game" the system, or reduce the quizzes to algorithmic abstraction. When I designed duck, my goal was to make the system student-centric enough that students wouldn't try to game it.
A student presented a report that looked at three students using duck and two of them were gaming the system. They would log in under an assumed name (note that it's possible to log in as a guest to see all the answers and questions, but the students use an assumed name, for some reason), print out the questions and answers, and then log in using their true identity, click only on the "correct" answers, and finish the questions more quickly that the lone student who was trying to go through the questions seriously.
What's interesting is that duck doesn't keep track of "right" or "wrong" answers. Duck has feedback from the teacher for each of the responses. The instructor can see when student's logged in and they can see all of the answers students selected and the order in which they selected them. They can also get whole class summaries that show (in histograms) how many students selected each item first and how many total. Most faculty use Duck to give students a small amount of credit for taking a quiz before class or as something optional. (My experience has been that students are extremely happy to have questions like this to help them study for exams, so you don't need to give credit to have 90-100 of students using the system).
So there are a lot of questions that could come out of this already. Why do the students try to game the system? Under what circumstances do students try to game the system? But the question I had for the students relates to a final observation in the report. The observation was that, in spite of the different strategies, all of the students are doing "about the same" in the course. I've asked my students to propose hypotheses that could explain this observation and how we could test the hypotheses. I'll be really interested to see what they propose.
Philip mentioned the All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Guidlines had been posted, so I decided I was going to write a zeppelin adventure story too. I sketched out an initial set of ideas and, since then, I have been writing. I've got about 1600 words so far. The writing went really well initially, but yesterday I ran into a snag. I wrote to Phil saying
I've started writing my zeppelin story. I'm about a third of the way done. I've gotten stuck on a problem and I'm not sure quite how to resolve it. I think I can keep writing and resolve the problem later, but it's hard, you know.
Philip replied, saying "Why, yes. As a matter of fact, I do know."
Since then, I've decided what happens next and have put in a bit of backfill so that the reader will understand what happens when it does.
I haven't written much fiction, but since Philip started writing, I've written two short stories. In the last story I wrote, Phil pointed out that the story wasn't focused enough: there were two or three issues, none of which emerged as a clear focus of the story. I'm trying to fix that in this story.