ok, I don’t really have much of a history; however, I feel I have developed some programming assignments thus far that allow tihe students to wrap their heads around all topics in Java. Both of these programs are not necessarily original ideas, but they allow the students to develop through the thought processes needed to program at the high school and early college level.

Gorilla

This is much like the original QBasic game which was called Gorilla. The object is to throw an object that hits a target. Specific details…

1. The target is 2 m wide on a 500m course. The students produce a random number from 2 to 499 which emcompasses the entire course.

2. The gorilla throws the object with a user specified velocity and angle. So adjusting the angle and velocity changes how far the object will travel.

3. The distance the object travels is given by…

4. The program continues to tell the user how far away from the target they are until the target has been hit.

This program uses many code practices including user input, while loops, for loops, if-else structures, and math.

Encode/Decode

This program is used to encode and decode messages based on the following criteria…

10 – 35 is A-Z
37 is space
38 is comma
39 is period
40-65 is a-z
67 is exclamation
68 is ?
69 is &
70-79 is 0-9

So if the message “Testing this program” is encoded, the program prints out 2944585948534637594748583755575446574052.

And the code 324451425452443759543752643741515446676767 would be decoded to “Welcome to my blog!!!”.

Almost too much fun can be had while messaging each other back and forth using the code. I posted some code for each students to decode and respond to within a day. Was fun decoding the student messages, because it was something that only the class and my students would understand.

This program uses many code practices including the ASCII character set and loops.