PowerPoint Presentation Distributed Systems Lecture PowerPoint演示文稿分布式系统讲座.pptVIP

* Scratching the Itch Jeff Parker, Merrimack College Scratch@MIT The primary purpose of the Data statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable Pi can be given that value with a Data statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change. Fortran manual for Xerox Computers * Outline Setting: Teaching CS1 to students that didnt apply to MIT Problem: Hard for students to follow what a program is doing Harder for students to write programs It takes a long time to get to the good stuff Course Goals: Computers can do interesting things Computers do only what you program them to do Good News: Scratch can help us teach these points and many other things Bad news: They need to move from Scratch to C++ or Java at some point * What do we use Scratch to teach? We start CS1 with 2 weeks of Scratch We cover If Statements If touching sprite2 Loops Simple loops w/ observable events Objects Sprites have state (such as position) and behaviors Plugability Recursive nesting (see next slide) * What do we use Scratch to teach? * Difficulties Equations are a difficult concept to grasp Students do not understand equations Heck, most adults dont understand equations Each equation in the book would halve the sales. Stephen Hawking Students do not understand assignment Students have trouble with the notion of a variable See the work of Dietmar Kuchemann and Zalman Usiskin And variable in CS is different from a variable in Math They really have trouble with notion of an indexed variable * Simplicity of Model There is (almost) no syntax in Scratch. Compare Further, there is no loop index for (int i = 0; i 10; i++) pop(); * Examples Focus on one issue: reading or writing a simple loop. for (int i = ...; i size; i++) dest[i] = source[i]; // copy if (a[i] max) // Find max max = a[i]; a[i-1] = a[i]; // Shift left fib[i]