Fwd: First impresion about CS1 class with Kojo

[Lalit Pant]

Here's some interesting feedback from Christoph Knabe ("Professor for Software Engineering and Programming" at Beuth University of Applied Sciences, Berlin). The feedback relates to the first programming course in their media informatics program (for ~18 year olds)...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Christoph Knabe <...@beuth-hochschule.de>
Date: Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 3:19 PM
Subject: First impresion about CS1 class with Kojo
To: Lalit Pant <...@gmail.com>

Hi Lalit,

I now completed the first week of lectures.

During the lectures it is very easy to try out something. I often ask how to produce a figure, collect proposals and then try it out. It is so good, as we immediately get feedback, if we thought right. And we get the feedback not in a poor textual way but in bright colors.

Now all students handed in their solution for the first exercise. They had to produce a regular 6-angle polygon and then to modify it to 8-angle, 10-angle, 11-angle etc. The goal was to introduce the need for named values.

This example was very instructive, as at the 11-angle polygon if we make an angle by right(360/11) the truncation error will sum up to 8 degrees and you see a real gap in the drawing. If you do right(360.0/11) there will be no gap.

Some students really got enthusiastic.
One greek student used the command "invisible()", which I did not teach. When I asked where she had it from, she answered she got enthusiastic and read the english Kojo book.
Another student asked if she could get the source code for the example "Coloured squares", which uses the hueMod function. She wanted to play with colors.

Best wishes and big thanks for producing such a great learning environment.

Christoph