On Thursday, the students in the Scientific Computing class continued to work on their projects. Eventually the students needed to do things with their program that couldn't be done without more knowledge of Perl. At one point Dave taught them how to do pattern matching, and at another he taught them how to write and read from files using Perl. By the end of the day, their programs were leaps and bounds better than when they had started. In the last hour of the day, the students started looking at how they would present the cryptography program Friday.