At that age, I recall trying to program a spaceship fighting game in basic on the apple ][e (hopeless spaghetti that never ran, aside from the "hyperspace" effect at the start), and later getting very involved in programming robots in the game Robot War, which had a maximum number of instructions and a limited command set, which required programming in the pseudo assembly language to really milk the most out of your code.
In short, I enjoyed programming games and moving pixels around. As to scientific computing, in a similar vein I can see a teenager becoming interested in generating fractal images, getting chaotic behavior from a simple iterated function, or simply plotting 3-d surfaces of sines and cosines. These all fall under "changing colored bits on the screen as a result of some programmatic command." Some of the clustering code is also pretty cool, I recall toying with the EM code and being pretty impressed by its ability to pick out similar pieces in noisy data. The inverse of clustering is of course, generating noisy data, so that could become a game of sorts---try to stump the clustering code by generating data from more than one distribution. I use a GPS a lot with my work, and put that data into R for analysis. Perhaps a handheld GPS unit can do the same thing, thus offering a source of data collection to dump into R for plotting and analysis. If of course you have a gps unit. James At approximately Fri, Jan 24, 2003 at 08:20:20AM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > I would like to teach some scientific/statistical computing to my 13 > year old nephew and was considering using R for this. He has a Mac G3 > OS 9.1. > > I am looking for ideas for problems that would be interesting and > motivating for someone that age. I recently taught him the basics of > HTML and noticed that he particularly was intrigued by the ability to > change colors; thus, perhaps problems that involve flashy color plots > would keep his attention. > > Thanks for any ideas. > ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
