Aha! So you were one of the sources of the answer! Hehe... anyway, using Dijkstra's algorithm is the most efficient way of solving that problem. However, you can do it the brute force way. You see, here is where the problem lies - in the problem solving techniques of the students. If the Internet is inaccessible to students or if the books are not available in the library, then I would have given simpler exercises. The point is, students are lazy - they have practically all the information at their fingertips. :-)
As for graphical programming, it is easy to do in Java - Deitel uses this approach. However, it is quite difficult to introduce in C - and would have introduced a more complicated environment than the command line. Curses might be easier than X but might be more cryptic for the students. PS. when in 1995 was this? I left the Philippines in 1995. :-) --o000o-- Prof. Rommel Palma Feria, MSc, MIEEE, MACM Director, University Computer Center University of the Philippines - Diliman Quezon City 1101 Philippines Voice: +63 2 9268837 Fax: +63 2 9204803 ----------------------------------------- Original Message: From: Rafael Dido Sevilla <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Philippine Linux Users Group Mailing List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sat Nov 15 14:41:30 EST 2003 Subject: Re: [plug] [OT] More on Programming in the Philippines On Sat, Nov 15, 2003 at 08:44:41AM +1100, Rommel P Feria wrote: > When I was teaching Java programming as an elective and C as a > language for programming 1, I mostly gave simple mathematical problems > and lo and behold, the students today find it quite difficult to solve > these problems. I suppose you do mean that in a relative sense, Prof. :) While I was never one of your students at the undergrad level, I do remember helping some of my friends who were your students slog through the machine problems you assigned them. I clearly remember one problem you gave back around 1995 where they were supposed to write a program that found the shortest path between two points of an arbitrary user-generated maze. This was for CS11, the first elementary programming course. The only solution I could think of was generating a graph from the maze, with vertices for every crossroads in the maze (plus the start and end points of the maze), and then using Dijkstra's algorithm to find the shortest path between the start and end points of the maze! We only learned this algorithm formally a year later, with CS32, the data structures course. I only managed to find a solution because I had been reading Sedgewick's Algorithms since I was in high school. :) Surely you didn't expect the majority of students right out of high school to be familiar with graph algrithms and other topics of discrete mathematics? ;) Regardless, I think that your observation in general is still dead on correct. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using DeskNow Lite - Free mail & collaboration server http://www.desknow.com -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
