Here we go loopty loop

re: Here we go loopty loop

Gary Kacmarcik — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 03:20:17 GMT

Back in Jr High School, I had to write some sentence 100 times as punishment for some terrible thing that I had done (no, I don't remember what it was).

I asked if I could do it on a computer and the teacher said that would be OK. Of course I wrote a program with a for-loop to do this -- I even had a few if-then-else's to introduce typos to make it look more legit.

Perhaps that is the assignment we should be giving all students when we want them to learn loops : Feign outrage at something the class does and punish them all by having them write some sentence 100 times. This punishment should coincide with them learning about loops.

Actually, thinking about this more, it may need to be "a million times" to prevent them from simply cut-n-pasting. But allow the students to turn in either the sentences OR a program to generate them.

re: Here we go loopty loop

Bryan — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 14:31:27 GMT

Thank goodness you did not post the answer to the Twelve Days of Christmas - I use that as one of my programs on the first semester final. In the directions I tell the students to use loops( min of two) and not put just lots and lots of couts. And you know that I will still get about 6 or 7 a class that will hand write out all twelve versus. And for some reason this year a lot of my students want to use do/while loops to count? When I ask them why? most just say they forgot the for works better. - just stepped away to help a student in tutorials and guess what he used to count 20 times... do/while. As the old songs says - and the beat goes on..

re: Here we go loopty loop

Alfred Thompson — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 04:04:15 GMT

I think that arrays and loops are one of those things that tend to be an early indicator of if people are really going to "get" programming. We probably need to find better ways to help more people understand and us (grok if you will) loops and arrays so that they can progress on.

re: Here we go loopty loop

Dave Winer — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:30:57 GMT

I don't remember loops being hard, but I do remember having a hard time with addresses and dereferencing them. And pass-by-value and pass-by-reference. I remember when the light went on, it's just like the address on the front of a house. But I'd always have to work through that when trying to understand code that used addresses. Now it's of course second-nature. But loops weren't hard for me, or arrays.