This project is introduced before students begin working with Lists and is then assigned as a pair programming project after work on the Lists curriculum is finished. I have used it with mostly Freshman students taking Beginning Computer Science and assigned it about halfway through the year.
Owen Ostrachen, of Duke Univeristy, deserves mention here. I saw him around 2002 use a version of a student picker in a workshop at SIGCSE. He was illustrating how such a program could facilitate more engagement in the classroom. BYOB!/SNAP, which allows for easy broadcasting and image handling, facilitates this to become a student project for beginning students in and of itself.
I have attached instructions(doc and pdf) as well as an example of the Student Picker.
You can comment on this lesson or suggest changes either below or at the google doc I have created.