A Day of Pong

Just had a great day.

Marking.

I've been working my way around the lab looking at programs that have been written for our first year C# course. All the students have to present their programs and I've seen some great work. I love it when people come up with ideas I wouldn't have thought of and then get them to work. The name of the game, quite literally, was to write a Pong implementation to run in the console window of the PC. Next semester, if they want, students can get the code onto a real console, when we convert the game to XNA for the Xbox.

Everyone I saw had a fully working version, some with sound, computer players, variable speed, the works. And many of the people that I saw only started programming in September. Great stuff.

I'm in the lab tomorrow too. Lucky me.

Comments

[Andy Callaghan]

At Reading University we learn C and C++ rather than C# in the first year of Computer Science. I think that this is a far better idea than teaching C#, as C and C++ give a better grounding in programming techniques like memory and pointers than the abstracted C# language does.

I also think that it is very convenient that you teach C# - Microsoft's take on C rather than another language, and that you host the Slide event with them each year. I can't help but notice that Hull University do conveniently well in the Imagine Cup every single year for Software Design.

Am I seeing a pattern here?

[Rob]

Hmmm. We do C++ and C in the second year. Our reasoning is that having learnt how to apply references you then learn how they really work. We've found that hitting pointers from the start makes learning to program really hard (I used to teach a C course as a first year programming language and it was very difficult to explain them from first principles).

I'm not sure that concentrating on C# in the first year gives us much of an inside track on the Imagine Cup, as far as I know you can write your entries in C or C++ if you wish. We don't actually host Slide every year, but we do offer to help with sessions. I think that we do well at the Imagine Cup because we work hard on the entries, convenience doesn't have much to do with it.