RobotC has potential

RobotC is text-based, unlike NXT-G & RoboLab which are icon/image based. If students have a background in either of these other languages, they may have a bit of a culture shock - or so I thought! In practice, it seems that students these days (at least the ones I am mentoring) are thoroughly computer-literate and are quite reasonably at home typing in text to teach their Robots what to do - frankly I'm surprised how quickly this language can be picked up.

RobotC is a very powerful system - more powerful in fact than languages I had used for writing production computer systems some years ago. It's debugging is especially nice, and a huge advance on the debugging available in NXT-G & RoboLab. I imagine it should be possible to both write and debug quite large programs using this system, something I have my doubts about regarding NXT-G & RoboLab. It would seem to me to be a good introduction to a commercial language system such as some of Microsoft's offerings.

My first impression is that RobotC has a really good potential as a tool for teaching programming in a School, especially if it is combined with LEGO Mindstroms NXT kits, as the latter make allowance for those students who are concrete (as opposed to abstract) thinkers. Being able to actually see what goes on (as opposed to imagining it) is an enormous help to students who employ this mode of thinking - some psychologists claim that half the Western adult population use concrete thinking almost exclusively - so this is an important consideration.

Why is there no Challenge 1?

Having a semi-mathematical background, I thought it would be nice to think that the next Challenge would be EVEN better! Get it - even numbers - even - all right, I can hear the groan from here! Anyway, I have re-numbered these Challenges twice already, and it is a pain - so hopefully if it becomes important to insert other Challenges into the series, the even-numbering system will allow space for this without having to re-number the whole lot again. Here's hoping...

Will this Challenge fill the Whole Two Hours?

Probably not. This is a short Challenge. It may perhaps be possible to complete Challenges 4 & 6 EVENtually (sorry, couldn't resist) during this session as well, if your students are making fast progress. One of the reasons I have kept these first few Challenges short is to try to allow for the type of starting-up problems that seem to happen frequently in programs like this. If everything is going well, you may be able to get ahead - if all hell has broken loose, the short Challenges will at least mean that your students will have been able to have completed something!