Well, you can pass it a pointer to a struct or object with an id and everything else you want to initialize it with and potentially communicate to it with.

Is it an exercise in finding out the student knows a) about thread ids, or is it about b) passing to the thread at creation time, never mind c) the distributed approach of checking one out from a mutex integer? The mutex integer, especially in an object, can have a corresponding array of pointers where the thread can hang a struct of all the data it is involved in for global access. The object interface method can ensure the array is large enough to hold the current number of this applications thread struct pointers. Distributed generation of the struct, array entry lightens the load on the master thread at startup. Since we are in thread land, it is time to think about parallelism and delegated tasks.