September 13, 2005

Where are Anthony and Dad?

Where is part 3 of "programming with Anthony?" We've been busy here having birthday parties and vacationing. Anthony's Mac GuessANumber game is done, so hopefully I'll have some time to write about it and post it here soon.

Posted by David at September 13, 2005 12:44 PM
Comments

Please do! I can't wait -- I love this series.

Posted by: Adam at September 13, 2005 05:03 PM

Hi!

This little project of yours with your son Anthony was too good to resist on applying to my 6-year-old daughter!

OK, this is downright plagiarism on my part, but, as Edna Mode puts it... "I just simply had to continue!"

There were a few absences/twists from your idea...

1) the program, Guess, was written in 35 line of Java, rather than Python. I know no Python, so I thought Java would be a good substitute. (I could have done it in Bourne Shell, but thought... ugh, why bother?!) ':-D

2) there are no vampires, and no sounds... just a simple "guess a number..." game in good ol' console text.

3) there were no limits to the number of guesses; I took the opportunity to use the program to teach her numbers between 0 to 100, and the concept of less and/greater than, which she didn't get a grasp of, yet.

4) I decided to add an on-board ruler (a simple text display of something like a standard class-room measurement ruler) showing the closest numbers around the computer's chosen number selected so far, so that when the computer says "lower" or "higher", she can get a visual understanding of what the computer is talking about.

But apart from all that, she loves the game! We play every night, and it's fascinating how her interest in this little game--a game that was developed in front of her eyes (not that she understood the how's and why's) on a personal computer in less than 10 minutes--grew to what's now a nightly ritual!

Thanks for the idea, Anthony! And to you, David! I hope that what you showed me about using computers as a learning tool (however crude!) can be shown to be a fun and rewarding experience for our youngsters!

Posted by: tonza (Tony Kavadias) at September 20, 2005 10:20 PM

OK... after perfecting the ruler to make it visually appealing, and to tighten the code a bit, that amounts to 67 lines of Java code.

The 35 lines excludes the ruler! I'm sure my daughter would not have been interested in me debugging my ruler code!!!

Cheers!

Posted by: Tony Kavadias at September 20, 2005 11:16 PM
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