Subject:
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Re: FLL not allowing NQC; Mindscript is allowed
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Thu, 10 Mar 2005 06:55:40 GMT
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Original-From:
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Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net&nospam&>
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Viewed:
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3358 times
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Steve Hassenplug wrote:
> But, without knowing what the icons mean, you came pretty close to knowing what the
> program does.
Nonsense. It's not the actual *code* that you need to understand - it's the ALGORITHM.
Yeah - to the totally uninitiated, a bunch of boxes with an arrow pointing backwards
tells you there is a loop - and maybe a 'for ( x = 0 ; x < 10 ; x++ )' statement does
not - but if you are looking at a program with forty loops and as many 'if'
statements, the icon diagram will be an insanely tangled mess.
Neither of them will be immediately comprehensible to anyone comeing at it cold
with only 4 to 5 minutes to look at it in.
> I would argue that it would be much easier for most kids to explain 14 icons than
> 30-40 lines of text. (in 4-5 minutes)
Then grade the kids on the quality of their explanation and the documentation. If that
gives a natural advantage to the icon-based system - then so be it.
In the real world, you don't go to a customer meeting armed with a million lines of
C++ code all neatly printed out in 20 boxes of single-spaced printout. You go with
some high level block diagrams - some broad-brush descriptions of the algorithm and
some smart people who know the code well enough to field difficult questions.
You should be able to explain what your FLL program does to a complete non-programmer
without descending to the level of 'this statement does this and that loop does that'.
If FLL is to have the educational value they claim - it should be as much like
the real world as we can make it.
---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
HomeEmail: <sjbaker1@airmail.net> WorkEmail: <sjbaker@link.com>
HomePage : http://www.sjbaker.org
Projects : http://plib.sf.net http://tuxaqfh.sf.net
http://tuxkart.sf.net http://prettypoly.sf.net
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V-- PS++ PE- Y-- PGP-- t+ 5 X R+++ tv b++ DI++ D G+ e++ h--(-) r+++ y++++
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: FLL not allowing NQC; Mindscript is allowed
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| On Wed, March 9, 2005 6:31 pm, John Hansen said: (...) But, without knowing what the icons mean, you came pretty close to knowing what the program does. I would argue that it would be much easier for most kids to explain 14 icons than 30-40 lines of (...) (20 years ago, 10-Mar-05, to lugnet.robotics)
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