🚀 go-pugleaf

     I'm in a sticky situation and need some advice.  I'm teaching a class
in introductory C programming to a mixed group of people, ranging from a
faculty member here in the Microbiology department, to graduate and
medical students, to one person (a young adult) who is a talented graphic
artist but has a weak background in math and science, and no previous
programming experience.  On the other hand, he's bright, and a wiz at such
Macintosh packages as Photoshop, Swivel-3D, and the like, as well as such
conventional media as pencil and paper rendering.  My artistic
development, on the other hand, reached its zenith when I discovered in
the 3rd grade that if you mix enough colors of paint, you get brown.

     I'm really struggling to find programming assignments I can give
which will be useful and interesting to him.  When I wrote the syllabus
for the course, all my programming assignments were aimed at people who
had strong math and science backgrounds (find prime numbers, solve the
ideal gas law equation, stuff like that), but these are totally lost on
him.  He is eager to learn, but is falling behind in the class because of
this.   I've already had one other person of similar background drop out
of the course because "I'm a visual person, not a programmer", and I'm
determined not to see that happen with a 2nd student.

     I don't have much experience in graphics programming, but all the
examples I can think of in that field seem like they quickly end up
involving math which is beyond this student's capabilities.  So, what I'm
looking for are some topics in computer graphics which will grab this
student's interest, but which are free of higher math, and of a scope
which could reasonably be expected to be handled in the first few weeks of
an intro programming course by a student with no prior programming
experience.

     I've been teaching the course in a Unix environment.  If it helps,
we've got available to us CodeWarrior on the Mac, but I shied away from
teaching in that environment, because I'm not very experienced with it (I
tend to believe it's a good idea for a teacher to know more about the
environment in which he's teaching than his students).

PS, if you want to see some examples of this students artistic work, check
out the following:

http://mchip00.med.nyu.edu/images/new_homepage.gif
http://mchip00.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/medhum_titletr.gif
http://mchip00.med.nyu.edu/~meadj01/path/hiplogo.gif

-- 
Roy Smith <roy@nyu.edu>
Hippocrates Project, Department of Microbiology, Coles 202
NYU School of Medicine, 550 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
"This never happened to Bart Simpson."