Games provide Fun(ctional programming tasks)
Kris Aerts, Karel De Vlaminck · Lirias · 1999
When teaching a computer science course to non computer science students, it is often difficult to motivate these students. Intriguing examples and tasks may help in doing so. We often use games as the topic of our tasks, because the fun part increases the students' enthusiasm. In the talk we present two particularly successful mind games. In Apollo 13 the player tries to make a safe landing on the moon, in Overlapping Rectangles he and his computer opponent pick rectangles, each trying to achieve the greatest area. They have proven so successful because their mathematics are easy to understand but nevertheless non-trivial. The implementation also gains a lot from the use of abstract data types, which is a key feature in our introductory programming course using Scheme. After the basic game we increase the complexity by either adding new Abstract Data Types or by tuning the current algorithms. A final and very interesting aspect is the use of functions to parametrise the behaviour o...