On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 15:14 -0600, Russel Caldwell wrote: > Let me ask you this. What do you think a teacher needs to do to encourage > students to work on there own, especially in computer science? One young > programmer who impressed me very much said that the teacher should encourage > play which I totally agree with. He said that there is too much emphasis on > creating trivial programs to teach concepts and that students should be > allowed to work on and improve more complex programs. I think he gave > Microsoft XNA Game Studio as an example. What freesoftware tools and > resources would you recommend along these lines?
There's lots of stuff out there. Just off the top of my head, here's two: http://www.pygame.org/ http://julian.togelius.com/mariocompetition2009/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlkMs4ZHHr8 BYU's AI class at least used to use BZFlag for its labs. http://bzflag.org/ _But_ one person's play is another person's tedium. I personally would have _loathed_ anything game related. I'd rather do something revolving around the Web, or maybe robots like MIT is doing now. http://blog.snowtide.com/2009/03/24/why-mit-now-uses-python-instead-of-scheme-for-its-undergraduate-cs-program -- "XML is like violence: if it doesn't solve your problem, you aren't using enough of it." - Chris Maden /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
