The Problem: Create a basic 1970s style Pong game for one player using the Processing programming language. The paddle will be on the right and the ball will bounce off of the three other sides. If the ball passes the paddle while the ball is traveling to the right, game play ends. The paddle will [...]
I’d like to give a brief overview of computational efficiency, since it’s a topic that has come up in a few conversations recently. The super short version is this: it’s often helpful to understand the resource (time, space, or power) needs for a given algorithm. Why? Because we want the fastest algorithm, or the one [...]
Alfred Thompson questioned on his blog today whether the customary first programming exercise, Hello World, should be replaced with something that’s more flexible and calls on students to engage in a short, non-trivial first act as a programmer. I admit, I’ve used Hello World myself with students, but usually not as a first activity. Instead, [...]
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Imagine for a moment that you were going to teach writing in standard English in the same way we tend to teach computer programming. Alright… Let’s learn to write. Before you can write, you need to know about the fundamentals of the language we’re going to use. A language is a collection of words and [...]
Eric Freudenthal of the iMPaCT: a Media-Propelled introduction to Computational Thinking project spoke at SIGCSE 2010 about how to engage students who are math phobic with computation and, thereby, with math. Using Python and computation about dynamic systems, students work to understand how code == math == concepts. One issue raised was how ethical it [...]
Every programmer and programming language has a preferred variation on how to format code. Here are my best suggestions for the languages I tend to code.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
The R Project provides a comprehensive, free, open source statistical programming language and environment based on the S language. R is the name of both the language and the environment in which you generally use the language. It’s an interactive environment where the commands you enter generate immediate results that you can use to guide [...]