Saturday, July 16, 2011

General comments about the first exercise

What we're looking for is a 'structure' (drawings or a physical models) that you design as a result of experimentation using algorithmic thinking. Essentially we are looking at how repeated instructions can create different structures based on different inputs.

If you remember in the algorithm exercise sheet we handed to you in the lecture where we asked you to write an algorithm and a repetition.
Say for your algorithm, you specify a line 1 unit down, then two units to the right and 1 unit up. You get |__ __| shape if you were to draw it. Now in the repetition, if you were to specify it to repeat that algorithm by moving it down 1 and right 1, you would get a pattern like:
|__ __|__ __|__ __ |
      |__ __|__ __|__ __|
            |__ __|__ __|__ __|

etc....

Now if I were to change the repetition to repeat moving down 1, right 2, you would get:
|__ __|__ __|__ __|
           |__ __|__ __|__ __|
                      |__ __|__ __|__ __|

Now what if you were to repeat by down 1, right 3? or down 2, right 2? How would it look when you put them side by side or one above another? What if you changed the lines to circles? Algorithm: Draw a circle 1 Radius, Repeat right 1, down 1, increase radius by 1?

We are trying to get you to think how you could use a simple algorithm along with an repetition sequence to create different types of structures, because when you do programming, you will see that it's largely repeating one set of graphics (algorithm) using a repetition modifier parameter.

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