Need help with a Parallel or Serial Port Project

I have to do a final project for pc engineering grd 10. It needs to have parallel or possibly serial ports to it. I am open to ANY ideas, could you guyz plz provide some kind of idea which isnt TOO hard but isnt too easy (need to get a good mark). Teacher told me i could do a project by building a robot and amake a controller for it, has neone done this and is it easy (building a robot doesnt sound easy )

was thinking of something along the lines of attaching a couple of LED's and the parallel port on the breadboard then puttin the parallel port to the back of the computer and typing in msgs that will show on the LED's or without LED's but the msg would show on the screen. I dunno maybe something like that ......any ideas how to do it, i think im gonna have to make a program for that on Turing.?