Had a similar experience. VB class in HS was my first programming experience, but me and another guy finished the end of course project in the first month. It was a playable tic-tac-toe game. Instructor said if we made the computer actually play a side, we'd get 100s for the class. Took me a day or two to write an algorithm for it combining identical game states, the other guy spent a few days making an absurd mess of nested if statements to cover every possibility. Spent the rest of the year alternating between making more games (a clone of Space Invaders and then the beginnings of a clone of Legend of Zelda) and playing an NES emulator, which the instructor overlooked. Probably wouldn't have approved if she'd noticed we had it saved locally in the school machine and the emulator was called NESticle, complete with an icon depicting a hairy sack...