Much like the Collatz conjecture, the Dr. Square Puzzle (from the blog mathforlove) is an intriguing problem. With some playing around, we came up with what I think is an excellent (and solvable) puzzle. He dubbed it the Dr Square puzzle, because it involves … Continue reading
Coolest thing I’ve seen in a while: High Resolution Mandelbrot code in Python. The following Python script, on the other hand, begins as ASCII art: It renders the Mandelbrot set as a full-color, anti-aliased, 1500×1000 image. Fantastic. Notice that the … Continue reading
I forget who introduced the Light-bot game to me, but thank you. I got the link from Hélène Martin. Much thanks! First day went excellent in Introduction to Programming class. “We get to play a game?” Introduction to loops, functions (methods), and debugging all … Continue reading
This will be my third year teaching Introduction to Computer Programming. The first year I had 15 students which was a good showing, but last year I only had 5 students. It turned out to be a scheduling issue, but … Continue reading
After some of my favorite bloggers wrote posts talking about their favorite books of 2010, here and here, I’ve decided to do the same but with a twist. I don’t end up reading more than 5 books a year, but … Continue reading
My name is Dan, and I’m addicted to Euler (pronounced Oiler). Not really, but this site is fabulous: http://projecteuler.net/ The gist of it for non-math people is that it has a list of problems, for example, find the 10,001st prime number. … Continue reading
Something cool out of microsoft? Very neat simple “programming game”. Like Scratch, but 3d and pretty. Its now available for PC (originally only xbox). Preview from slate Microsoft’s Kodu page
Don’t know if you’ve seen this, but its a very cool student-made computer game whose premise is awesomely original. Devil’s Tuning Fork is a first-person game where you have no “vision”. The only way you can see is if you … Continue reading
We’ve used a open-source tool called robocode. Basically it is a game where you program robots in Java (or .Net). The robots battle in real-time and on-screen. It was a closing project (last 4 weeks) to our Intro to Programming … Continue reading