Weekly/Monthly Assignment for Beginners/Intermediate

[Tempora Telora]

All,

I think it would be great if you all posted an assignment a month and had users reply with their source to your assignment. This will allow users to pick up different standardizations and view how other people write their code. This could allow them to pick up some cool tricks that they have never seen before.

I am trying to get back into java(programmed in it for about 3 years and am currently stuck in scriping world) and I think that this would help me out and other users out a ton.

This was posted in another area but was informed that maybe I should put it in here. Sorry for the double post.



Lammy

[Marilyn de Queiroz]

Interesting idea. We usually don't allow code to be posted in this forum. This would be quite the exception.

[John Abong]

The concept is a good one but I wouldn't want to see any solutions before I tortured myself for at least 3 months.

John Abong

[Dick Summerfield]

Originally posted by Randy Tatham:

I think it would be great if you all posted an assignment a month and had users reply with their source to your assignment.


Lammy

Not sure I understand who the "you all" are who are supposed to post the assignments... Also, it seems to me that the posting is the tip of the iceberg - at least if you envisage something similar to (say) the Ruby Quiz which is run apparently every week with all assigmnents and all solutions archived for reference. (It does seem a great resource)

Personally the Cattle Drive is enough for me at present - but then I've only just started

Regards,
Dick

[Katrina Owen]

I'd love to see assignments and various ways of solving them - but like John, I wouldn't want to see the solution until I'd wrung everything I could out of it myself.

Who would come up with the assignments? I think the assignments of the Cattle Drive are great, because they tease forth some very specific concepts requiring few enough lines that you can actually see the code emerge... how do you come up with great assignments?

When I was taking Java in college the assignments pretty much stunk. They were very involved, but didn't really teach what they were supposed to teach. We were writing programs that were several hundred lines long, and we <em>weren't getting it</em>. Another thing we weren't getting (besides the point, I mean), was feedback. If your program ran, more or less (sometimes less), you passed. If you spent 1000 lines doing something convoluted that could have been done decently in 100, and elegantly in 30, nobody would tell you.

One of the biggest revelations I ever had was after struggling with an assignement at uni for ages and then picking up Head First Java, which explained exactly the concept that I needed to hear in about 30 pages.
Lousy assignment. Good book.

Now, what makes a good assignment? Oh, yeah - and who?

[Ben Souther]

Originally posted by Katrina Owen:
I'd love to see assignments and various ways of solving them - but like John, I wouldn't want to see the solution until I'd wrung everything I could out of it myself.

One solution would be to require that a working solution be handed in before being granted access to see everyone else's solutions.

Now, what makes a good assignment? Oh, yeah - and who?

An expert who can still remember what starting out feels like.
[ November 23, 2007: Message edited by: Ben Souther ]