For the Java homework assignment, the sliding puzzle, I'm giving myself a grade of A+. In order to explain this, I'm going to go line-by-line through the guidelines and answer with what I've done.

• Get a photograph and cut it into six pieces. Use only five for the toy. -- I went one step further, setting it up so the program only needs to read in the big image, and then cuts it up itself.
• Write an applet that reads in the five images and then sends them to a canvas to be painted at certain x,y coordinates. -- Done; again, it only read in the one image, and handled creating five on its own.
• Create an object that has an image, x and y coordinates, its cell location (there are six cells), and a boolean flag indicating whether or not it can move. -- Done; it's the "piece" class.
• Create a randomizing process that selects a random number from 0 to 5 (i.e., there are six cells) and assigns one of the six cells to each image object. -- Done; this is handled in init_board() and scrambler().
• Create a canvas that receives these five image objects, paints them at certain locations and remembers where the blank is. -- Done.
• Add a MouseListener to the canvas that reports the location of a mouse click and figures out which cell has been targeted. -- Done, although with ActionListeners and the mousedown. It's basically the same thing.
• If the target cell "can move" then shift it to the blank cell (i.e., repaint it in the blank cell) -- Done in the mousedown() handling function.
• Add a button to the applet that "restarts" the process (i.e., generates another random number, assigns cell locations and sends them to the canvas to be repainted. -- Done.

The source code for the project is available here:

• puzzle.java - the puzzle source code.