March 5, 2009
10 p.m.
2009/3/6 Charles Cossé <ccosse@gmail.com>:
82+b*c-51=d-13, and the thing that surprised me was that he didn't think it was legal to take 82-51 before having dealt with the b*c term
This relates to a programming task called a "Parsons Problem", shown to be intermediate in difficulty between the tasks of interpreting code and writing code. In a Parsons Problem you see the lines of a 5-10 line program in scrambled order, and have to put them back in the right order. In some cases there's a bit of freedom (e.g. result += 82 and result += -51 could go in either order). http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1404520.1404532 -Steven Bird http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/~sb/