Dec. 5, 2004
11:39 p.m.
I haven't run into 'don't understand what a function is' but I have run into 'don't understand why you would want to use one'. My youngish students would rather just paste the formula that is in the function again, and again. So I gave them a problem where they calculated the cost of a list of somethings with a tax rate of 5%. The pasters were more or less as fast as the function users. Then I said 'ok, now the government has lowered taxes. They are now 4%'. Suddenly the pasters saw that the function users had a much easier time of it. And the climax was when I made them fix _each others_ code to make it produce the correct results. I was called 'mean' for that. :-) Laura