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bjornregnell / lth-eda016-2015

Public files of EDA016 "Programming, First Course" given at Lund University, LTH.
http://cs.lth.se/eda016
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Add labs to repo #1

Closed ErikBjare closed 8 years ago

ErikBjare commented 9 years ago

It would be nice to have all the labs in the repo so that people can easily make improvements such as:

All improvements should be managed via pull requests as usual.

PS. I'm particularly interested in lab 10 named "Life".

bjornregnell commented 9 years ago

Labs are hosted in a closed repo on Bitbucket with unclear license - I'll check with the other teachers if it's possible to make them public.

ErikBjare commented 9 years ago

That would be great! Thanks :+1:

bjornregnell commented 9 years ago

It is summer break so I don't expect rapid response from my colleagues, but as it is lab-life that was of particular interest, I'll upload the latex body for that lab (it's part of a complex build system so don't expect to be able to generate any pdf from it, but at least you can edit and create a pull request...). Thanks for your efforts; any improvement proposal / typo corrections etc. welcome!

bjornregnell commented 9 years ago

Now available here: https://github.com/bjornregnell/lth-eda016-2015/blob/master/labs/lab-life/instruktioner/uppgift.tex It is just a copied file from another repo, so I'd have to copy back manually for now. (Decision pending on making labs public, but let me know if you spot anything that needs to be updated.) The pre-print of the compendium must be made first week of august...

ErikBjare commented 9 years ago

Great!

I have to admit this idea was part of a larger plan to try and make some of the course participants (and lab/exercise-assistants) engage with building/improving the course by giving concrete examples for improvements (sent via PRs). The Life lab looks good, can't find any obvious issues.

Since Life is strongly related to the field [cellular automata]() (which a new student could easily navigate with considerable ease and even implement many of the ideas) it would be nice to have a list of "Read more" links on the bottom of the assignment for further study.

Take for example this cyclic cellular automaton:

Cyclic automaton

It's easy to implement, but provides a completely different behavior with a relatively simple change of rules.

Most students might not care, but if even a few do that's of considerable worth. If you are interested I could compile a list of related (and interesting) things. Some of which can be easily implemented once the student has made a solution to the exercise.

Incomplete list:

It would be nice if we could have interactive labs like this one written in something that's more easily shared, like JavaScript on a HTML canvas. I have a Life implementation [here](http://erik.bjareholt.com/GameOfLife/) for example.

I might complement this later on, but I need to change location right now so will be done later if so.

bjornregnell commented 9 years ago

Nice with larger plans ;) I have a larger plan of my own: as I'm taking over the responsibility of the beginner programming course, I'll use the first year to learn how the pedagogic approach and learning goals (e.g. regarding simple vector/matrix algorithms) are connected to the current activation+examination (e.g. a lab on game of life) and then the second year change those things that have a large potential to improve student learning in the direction that I would like to take us. I'm playing with the idea to move to a Scala+Java8 combo and involve as many as possible in creating open source teaching material during this study year aiming at going live in August 2016, but that is perhaps more of a dream than a plan ;). I'd be happy to talk about such ideas when we meet live!

I'd also be very happy to integrate a pull request for lab-life with a new \subsection{Extrauppgifter och fördjupningslänkar} by the end of the text that provides some bullets on ideas of further implementation quests and further reading etc. The cyclic cellular automatons you linked to are really cool and might indeed fascinate some students :) and they might learn something about matrices as the get carried away ;)

bjornregnell commented 9 years ago

I've just emailed a query to my colleagues, but it's summer vacation, so I guess we will discuss this later in August. We need to agree on licensing and how to handle the configuration and build process as the labs are used in many courses... I'll get back on this when I know more.

bjornregnell commented 8 years ago

I'm happy to accept errata and suggestions, but I want to avoid multiple repos and will keep the lab in orig. repo for now. (In the future we might move the labs to GitHub.) I'm closing this issue for now.