So, it’s been a while. I’m in the middle of a crazy-busy semester, as I mentioned before. Certain things have become luxuries: hobbies, a personal life, leisure time. Other than that, things are going well.
One of my big stress things happened last Friday. We (and by “we”, I mean “I”) hosted a day of professional development activities for IT teachers. This is like the third one of these we have done. My plan is always the same: get them in a room and talking about the good ideas they have had for their classes. Bounce ideas around with just enough structure to keep things moving.
This time, Richard came and we talked about robotics projects and ideas. Richard really knows his shit (which I guess shouldn’t be a surprise, since it is his research area), and I think the teachers came away with some ideas that never would have occurred to them otherwise. The feedback I’ve had has been really good.
Anybody else that wants to take my quiz is welcome to: consider the phrase “High School Robotics Competition”. Form a mental image of what that looks like. Tell me about it.
I just finished putting together my CMPT 120 midterm for Friday. I hate making up exams like a five year old hates eating asparagus. I whine, bitch, moan, procrastinate, and complain about how horrible my life is until it’s finally done. It’s done, so I’ll be much happier until the final exam comes around.
One of the other things I need to do for 120 is create the last assignments. I have always had the last assignment as an open-ended problem that the students don’t have a hope of “finishing”. The goal is for them to work on it, think about algorithms, and get some good stuff done. This lets the just-okay students accomplish something, and really pisses off the good students who work their asses off, learn a lot, but still don’t “finish”.
I was on the bus tonight and finally had the idea I’ve been waiting for. Their assignment is going to be programming the behaviour of a NPC (non-player character) in some kind of game. I haven’t worked out the game, but I’ll create a library to play the game, and their code will have to control the NPC(s) to be good opponents. The game will have to be fairly simple.
Any of the CS types want to help me work that out in exchange for lunch?
October 24th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
I’m still catching up from being at the two conferences, which were more like taunting me with vacation time rather than providing any of it.
I think the idea of programming an NPC is a great one. Build a simple text adventure? I picture something like Nethack… I wonder if that has some open source libraries sitting around? Just thinking out loud here. Hm, I think I’ll go look..
October 25th, 2007 at 8:19 pm
Neat!
PyGame?