Slashdot Mirror
Games Teaching the Basics of Programming
RandomPrecision writes to tell us Wired is reporting that computer programmer Igor Kholodov has created a game designed to make learning the basics of programming fun. From the article 'The board game turns players into skiers who must race down a mountain in the quickest way possible. With each roll of the die, players must follow instructions that are similar to computer program codes. Using basic math, players have to figure out which paths are open to them and then decide the fastest way to the finish line.'"
are over-rated. Seriously. As soon as someone finds out a game is educational, it kinda loses its touch. Dunno, that's just me.
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
At York University in Toronto, they have a "Science Olympics" held annualy for High School students, in which one even is Robocode. It's mad fun. Hundreds of teams duking it out on a battle royale in hugh projection displays. You can't get any better than that. It's like a really, really, geeky LAN-party. Exept with all the bawls.
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
You know, Dijkstra was a very smart man. However, I think he had a bad floppy on this one. His assertion that exposure to "GOTO" would screw up programmers for life is just silly.
Consider for a moment: How does the processor execute a branching statement? The answer is simple, it jumps to a new line! Just because the "line number" happens to be a memory address instead of a program line number doesn't make it any less of a GOTO. So if the machine operates that way to begin with, why should we shield programmers from the design?
IMHO, anyone who can't overcome a reliance on GOTO simply isn't programmer material to begin with.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
On the Education Page, which the story icon links to, this and the original are separated by nothing. :)
Xbox reviews.. We think they're funny.
I know its cool and hip to rag on the editors but in all seriousness the editors have shown that they are incapable of accurately searching for dupes. This has been known for literally years. It is assumed that dupes will make it through. As a result, I feel it no longer, nor has it been for some time, the responsibility of the editor to filter dupes. It is the responsibility of the article submitter to find dupes. Afterall, if you don't read slashdot so frequently that you regularly miss front page stories, you shouldn't be submitting articles. Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that even though dupe finding is easy, this only shows that the submitters are just as lazy as the editors. We are all geeks, we are lazy by nature, get over it or submit an autodupe finder to slashcode (hell, write a greasemonkey script for all I care). Sometimes when the administration (editors) fails to act, the underlings must step up to the plate. So here is my message to all future article submitters:
"Don't submit and dupe."
Regards,
Steve