The above exactly the kind of exercise we were assigned in my high school's intro CS course. The course was taught by a math teacher. BUT: The school waited u

The above exactly the kind of exercise we were assigned in my high school's intro CS course. The course was taught by a math teacher. BUT: The school waited until a month before the semester started to tell the math teacher that she'd be teaching the course. Worse, they had already picked out a textbook that was filled with exercises like this. Worst of all, she had basically never done any programming before. As time went on, and she actually had a chance to learn the material, this kind of coursework was replaced with more interesting and useful programming assignments. I later took a calculus course from this teacher, and in that course, she actually took great pains to avoid repetitive problem sets; almost every problem she assigned was designed to teach us something different. Repetitve exercises are likely easiest to assign and grade.