[Year 12 SofDev] Pondering SD U3O2

[Mark Kelly]

Too right, Mr T-A.  I have kids ranging from "What does a keyboard look 
like?" to "I program PHP in my sleep."

It's hard to cater for all levels of skill and experience.

Most of *my* programming is "classic" - i.e. I spent up to 20 hours a 
day churning out code in BASIC, C, 6502 and Z80 assembly code, and some 
machine code ... until I discovered girls.

I found the intricacies of female logic were way more convoluted than 
Shuffle, Bubble and Shell sorting algorithms.

Female algorithms include the wildcard "Because I SAID SO" assertion, 
which pretty much messes up any classic logical construct.

:-)


Mark

Timmer-Arends wrote:
> Hello Kevork
> 
> At the risk of being picky, the study design doesn't use the term 
> 'model' in this context - that was Adrian providing one interpretation 
> of how to approach the task. It doesn't preclude writing 'real' programs.
> 
>> I am not sure if I am a little naive here , but what is so special 
>> about "modelling" a program to run on a mobile device ?
>> What skill set is required to model this task apart from understanding 
>> that the mobile device has a smaller screen area ?
> 
> Many of the students I taught found writing any kind of program 
> difficult and gave little or no thought to screen design - especially if 
> the program only required 3 textboxes and a few labels placed somewhere 
> in the vast real estate of a standard monitor. The portable device 
> constraint would at least force that issue.
> 
> Also, just because the program the students write may never run on an 
> actual portable device, that doesn't make it any less real - it still 
> has to do everything the 'real' program has to, so the students still 
> have to write the same 'logical' code, although not necessarily the same 
> 'physical' code.
> 
> It seems to me that part of the issue here is the large difference in 
> ability and experience among students that the study design has to cater 
> for: my more or less rank beginners through to your highly experienced 
> student programmers. And, as it has been since VCE IT started, we have 
> the tough job of catering for and giving achievable challenges to that 
> range of students.
> 
> Regards
> Robert T-A
> Brighton SC
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-- 
Mark Kelly
Manager - Information Systems
McKinnon Secondary College
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