The Before Loop
My students last week invented the “before” loop. We won’t talk about loops in class for a while yet, but they waste no time in accidentally spawning them in unexpected ways. See their latest cleverness:
CS 396: Meeting 4 – Interviewing
Dear students, With the Career Breakfast and Fair behind us, we enter this nebulous period of waiting for a callback. If we get one, we’ll be in the position of talking at length about ourselves and the company we are courting. This kind of conversation is unfamiliar and universally awkward. We call it the interview. […]
CS 1: Lecture 12 – Testing and Graphics
Dear students, Is there anything like charAt for integers? For instance, given a number and an “index” representing the place, can we get back the digit at that place? Not exactly, but there’s nothing stopping us from writing our own method to accomplish this task! But before we do that, let me share with you […]
Eclipse Shortcuts
Eclipse has a lot of keyboard shortcuts and I know hardly any of them. But my students still think I’m an ace. These are the ones I do use on a regular basis, shared so that my students can be aces: Automatically add import statements to classes that live in faraway packages with Control-Shift-O or […]
CS 145: Lab 4 – More Methods
Welcome to lab 4! If you have checkpoints from the last lab to show your instructor or TA, do so immediately. No credit will be given if you have not already completed the work, nor will credit be given after the first 10 minutes of this lab. Checkpoint 1 Person A types. You’ve seen Practice-It!, […]
CS 1: Lecture 11 – Method Mechanics
Dear students, Sometimes Java is criticized for being verbose. But one of the great advantages of verbosity in a language is that a text reinforces itself. We may read a passage and not know every word, but there are often many clues lying in the context to help us determine their meaning. Java has these […]
CS 148: Lab 4 – Methods
Welcome to lab 4! If you have checkpoints from the last lab to show your instructor or TA, do so immediately. No credit will be given if you have not already completed the work, nor will credit be given after the first 10 minutes of this lab. Our goal today is to learn more about […]
CS 1: Lecture 10 – Blackboxes
Dear students, Let’s start with a little game called Blackbox! Write on paper a method that takes 1+ parameters. For the body of the method, compute a simple value based on the parameters. Have it return the value. For example, I might write this mysterious method: public static int mystery(int x) { int value = […]
CS 396: Meeting 3 – Resume Reviews
Dear students, Today Alyssa and her colleagues from Career Services will help us review resumes. Here’s your TODO list for next time: If you registered, attend the career breakfast on Thursday morning. Check in with me after you’ve met some employers, and I’ll credit your participation. I strongly encourage you to attend the larger career […]
CS 1: Lecture 9 – Return Values and Parameters
Dear students, Last time we saw how methods capture a process into a reusable component. Methods have some really nice advantages: They drop us into a smaller world with a smaller problem to solve. Instead of thinking about the grand mission of our program, we think about the baby step of the method. They can […]