Re: Conway's Game of Life (cellular automata)

[Michael Vanier <mvanier@bbb.caltech.edu>]

> Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2001 16:47:39 +0000
> From: MJ Ray <markj@cloaked.freeserve.co.uk>
> 
> On Wed, Dec 26, 2001 at 03:26:13PM -0800, Michael Vanier wrote:
> > > From: Matthias Felleisen <matthias@ccs.neu.edu>
> > > A student who knows nothing but C or C++ from 3 years of high
> > > school should never be able to pass an introductory course
> > > based on HtDP. 
> > Huh?  I can't tell whether you're being sarcastic or serious.  If the
> > latter, then as you know, we can't just fail people willy-nilly because of
> > the sin of having C backgrounds [...]
> 
> No, you can fail them for not learning.  Note the "nothing but" in what
> Matthais wrote.  I think the implication is that those students who assume
> that they know all about programming already and don't follow the course at
> all should almost certainly fail.
> 
> Of course, maybe the fact that these people who know all about programming
> actually have to learn something new is part of the reason why they develop
> such pathological hatred for Scheme.
>

Good points.  Most of our students were willing to learn something new, but
it's surprising how many have the
I-already-know-everything-about-programming attitude.  One thing that
helped me was when I asked them how long the largest program they ever
wrote was.  One student, who is very smart and who did in fact learn
scheme, told me that he'd written one program that was "almost a thousand
lines long" as if that was enormous.  When I pointed out that many programs
are hundreds of thousands of lines long, he started to realize that maybe
he didn't know everything yet.

Mike