I'm a teacher(instructor) of CS in the university. The course is based on Cormen and Knuth and students program algorithms in C++. But sometimes it is good to show how an algorithm works or just a result of task through GUI. Also in my opinion it's very imporant to be able to write full programs. They will have courses concerning GUI but...
Is there any good open-source implementation of Mersenne Twister and other good random number generators in Python available? I would like to use in for teaching math and comp sci majors? I am also looking for the corresponding theoretical support. Edit: Source code of Mersenne Twister is readily available in various languages such as ...
Is there such a thing as a paid (or free would be GREAT, but unlikely I'm thinking) resource that could help a newbie with guidance and help as I create my first app (C# with SQLite db)? Stackoverflow is great, but a one-on-one person who was familiar with exactly what I'm doing would be even better. Update I'm not looking for traini...
I was talking with some of the mentors in a local robotics competition for 7th and 8th level kids. The robot was using PBASIC and the parallax Basic Stamp. One of the major issues was this was short term project that required building the robot, teaching them to program in PBASIC and having them program the robot. All in only 2 hours ...
As a student teacher i am very interested in how effective "mini languages" such as Scratch, Logo, Alice and Lego mindstorms are in teaching the pupil the core concepts of programming such as variables, fuctions and loops. Is one "mini language" better than another for teaching these basic core concepts? ...
I want to show my young cousin (12) programming. I think that LOGO is a good start. Which implementation should I use? (windows) ...
Next week I have to give a presentation to a group of under privileged college students about the possibilities of a career in software development. These students have no exposure to programming what-so-ever. I have a good idea of how to tackle the non-technical, general portion of the presentation. However, notwithstanding my decade o...
I'm currently writing SDK documentation for one of our products, but for obvious reasons I don't want to talk about the essentials of OOP. Does anyone know any good online teaching material that explain (aimed at absolute beginners) concepts such as classes, inheritance, constructors, instances etc.? Preferably urls that are likely to su...
Hello My friend is teacher of first-year CS students. We want to show them buffer overflow exploitation. But modern distribs are protected from simples buffer overflows: HOME=`perl -e "print 'A'x269"` one_widely_used_utility_is_here --help on debian (blame it) Caught signal 11, on modern commercial redhat *** buffer overflow de...
I will be teaching a week long programming course to kids between the ages of 12-17. Most of the kids have no programming experience. The program is 5 days from 8:30 till 5:00. I think the class size will be small (5-7 kids)) I'm looking for two things 1) General tips for teaching a camp class (how to make it fun when explaining the d...
If you could organise your own programming meetup how would you organise the session so that people had fun learnt lots were able to participate despite their level. what kinds of topics, activities, challenges etc would you include (not all in one session but in general) how would you handle differing levels? what do you think a...
I'm a computer science student finishing up my second semester of programming classes. I've enjoyed them quite a bit, and learned a lot, but it seems other students are struggling with the concepts and assignments more than I am. When an assignment is due, the inevitable group email comes out the day or two before with people needing s...
I'm thinking in terms of Objects here. I think it's important to simplify ideas. If you can explain this to a 6-year old, you can teach new programmers the difference. I'm thinking that a cookie object would be apropos: public class Cookie { public string flavor {get; set; } public int numberOfCrumbs { get; set; } } ...
I have set myself upon a journey to educate my coworkers (all have accepted my mission, even the boss). Every day I seem to find a piece of code that could have been less error prone if my coworkers knew more about the framework, better-know-framework (in courtesy of DNR ;)) is part two of my teaching process. First part is teaching my c...
I'm trying to find a good metaphor to explain memory allocation, initialization and freeing in c to a non technical audience. I've heard pass-by-reference/value talked about quite well with postal service usage, but not so much for allocation/deallocation. So for I've thought about using the idea of renting a space might work, but I won...
As far as I can see, the usual (and best in my opinion) order for teaching iterting constructs in functional programming with Scheme is to first teach recursion and maybe later get into things like map, reduce and all SRFI-1 procedures. This is probably, I guess, because with recursion the student has everything that's necessary for iter...
A friend of mine wanted help learning to program, so he gave me all the programs that he wrote for his previous classes. The last program that he wrote was an encryption program, and after rewriting all his programs in Python, this is how his encryption program turned out (after adding my own requirements). #! /usr/bin/env python #####...
I'm looking for a good way to describe OO to beginners, though an analogy. Currently I'm likening a Class to a shopping list, and a shopping trolley full of items to an object. But I feel it's a bit confusing. Preferably the analogy would be reflected well in the code example (Ruby), currently I have this, and it feels klunky. # First...
I'd like to learn a few more languages to "expand my mind" a bit, and I find working through problems the best way to learn. I have been doing most of my programming in C, sometimes C++, and perl. With these tools, I seem to be able to solve the problems I encounter, but you know the expression "when you have a hammer, everything looks l...
I'm looking for a good slideshow/pdf/video explaining the differences in approach and thinking from hand-written threading of applications compared to the more abstracted and easier to use message passing and actor models. Does anyone know of existing resources to explain these concepts with good diagrams and visualizations? ...