3 ms·
Yes! Love it! It’s fun bringing the computers in to play as well, because I pitch to all my classes that we are in the age of information and the primary usef
by gorgoiler 7y ago
Yes! Love it!
It’s fun bringing the computers in to play as well, because I pitch to all my classes that we are in the age of information and the primary usefulness of algorithms is productivity.
A whimsical classroom example: programming a robot that can type for you, with an instruction set that consists of capital letters. Q returns to that key. LRDU are left a key, right, down, and up a key, and P means “press the key you are over”.
Step one: create robot code to type HELLO. Answer: QRRRRRDPLLLUPRRRRRRDPPUP.
Step two: create code to turn a robot code into a string: similate the robot essentially.
...which is about it for the coding, but then we make a robot print instructions for a second robot to print instructions for a third robot to print HELLO. We end up with something super weird looking but tractable because all the components were built from the ground up.
Computation is that wonderful meeting place between theory and leverage — the kind of leverage you get when you can do “2+2=4” 3 billion times a second.