🚀 go-pugleaf

roy@popmail.med.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) wrote:

>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.


How about some programming assignments for basic biological principles?
Plotting population growth, or allele selection.  This may be interesting to the
biologists, and only need a high school level of education?


>     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.

For an actual graphics or imaging project, i'd try to frame it
around the concepts you are trying to teach.

For your file IO sections, a graphics file manipulation may be a
good project.  I'd use XV to display the images,and create/read a PPM
(or other simple format) images. The for and while loops lessons 
can modify the images, convert to gray scale or blur the images.

Or you could do a simple OpenGL program, the samples in the OpenGL
programming guides are really simple and appropriate for a first
C class.


Alex