teaching machines

Peruvian ITiCSE

I had intended the summer to be a simple one. No teaching, no big grants, no painting the house. Then I learned that ITiCSE 2016 would be in Peru. This country is so far off the maps that chart out my life I knew that if didn’t go now, I never would. So, I submitted […]

No Ternary, No Problem

While waiting around in a Peruvian airport, a friend I met at a conference was playing a boolean logic game I’ve been working on. On one level he wanted to use a ternary operator to model a shape that behaved differently depending on which half of the 10-by-10 game board you were on. He wanted […]

Rator Vaders: Week 3

This week I added strings, chars, and function and method calls to Rator Vaders. Now max(“abc”.indexOf(‘c’), (“a” + “b”).length()) can attack Earth! I also added a weighting system to the random expression generator to make it easy to progressively generate more complex expressions as the player advances in the game. Initially, only the arithmetic operators […]

Precedence vs. Evaluation Order

I’ve been working on a little computer science learning game called Rator Vaders. Complex expressions drop from the sky, and the player has to fire at the highest precedent operator and evaluate it. This process continues until only a literal value is left, which can be sent to the Big Bit Bucket in the Sky […]

Rator Vaders: Week 2

Back in May, I said I’d record weekly snapshots of my progress on Rator Vaders. And I would have, except I stopped making progress shortly after I posted my first video. My attention was focused on other business of our ITiCSE working group, like reading papers and playing computer science games like Hack ‘n’ Slash […]