Programming challenge

[Marielle Lange]

Hi Andre,

>I know  that Dar Scott looks into ICFP coding compos, those
>competitions are a nice and should provide inspiration for us to create
>a coding compo. Maybe we could create a map, like a labirynth put some
>jewels in it and people should make routines to crawl the maze and
>collect the stones, the best one wins (that is trickier). The Doctor
>Eccos monthly article on the Doctor Dobbs magazine also give many
>puzzles that one might solve coding.

Funnily, I was thinking about something similar, yesterday, in the context of
designin a program for kids, motivating them to learn revolution. You give them
a puzzle, labyrinth and they have to learn to move a character around, using
scripting command. Initially they will use move left, move right... rapidly
they will ask you about looping, if/then and switch case.

>Of course this is about coding and we know that there's more to Rev
>then just coding. Another take could be mini apps, like create a stack
>that would pick a arbitrary number of JPEGs inside a folder and build a
>webalbumn, judges and people would grade the apps according to criteria
>based on easy to use, features, coding and the like.

Not challenging enough for me...

go stack url
"http://revolution.lexicall.org/stacks/mystacks/google_images_viewer.rev" 
(gets the images from google :-)) ).

This even adjusts the levels of the image (removes text from the back of the
page for images scanned from textbooks):

go stack url
"http://revolution.lexicall.org/stacks/education/presentation_tools/levels_adjustment.rev"

Didn't take more than a few hours to do both and I am only a sunday programmer
with no formal training whatsoever (apart from textbooks).

Variant of this I would be interested in: something that lets educators view the
content of the education wiki offline... All content is stored in a mysql
database. I can create a dump with a cron job and make it available for
download. I have already a script that does html 2 wiki conversion and
opposite.  This would be about displaying the content of the wiki as stack
content, with a page sequence that duplicates the one of the wiki.

Other ideas: Webgame warehouse: http://www.irt.org/games/js/; design challenges:
http://www.irt.org/games/chall/index.htm


For the "expert" category, I propose this as a challenge:

Representing workflows.

<http://revolution.lexicall.org/user_contributions/function_connect.gif> for the
mac users, this is used in the new quartz module to define how your image needs
to be manipulated. The difficult is in designing and moving around the wiring.
I really wonder whether how it could be done with revolution.

Very similar to it is automator's way of doing things.
<http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/automator/>.

This would be used to design an application for the easy editing of exercises,
by educators. For instance, (1) decide of the kind of exercise you want to show
(Multiple choice question, case study, etc.); (2) in case of a mcq, select a
question from a bank of question, enter given criteria, make a selection; (3)
using the result of this selection, create an interface (choose between
different styles for background and navigation); (4) save it in the format of
my choosing (web, stack, scorm package). The advantage of having this kind of
representation is that, for instance, I can change my mind on (2), but all
other things remain the same (and I do not have to restart from scratch and
re-enter them).

some more information on representing workflow:
<http://e-docs.bea.com/wlintegration/v2_1/studio/ch2.htm>

Okay, it's probably most appropriate as a "team" project or possibly a PhD
project... not that easy. I would like to hear if anybody has a clue on how to
program these.

>No matter the solution we choose, I think that all the entries should
>be released in Creative Commons license and that each participant
>should write a post-mortem about his entry, this could become a usefull
>resource of code snipets and insights.

Good idea!!! About snippets... I have started a collection at:
<http://revolution.lexicall.org/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=RevolutionSnippetTips>,
reproducing some tips found on this mailing list. Please let me know if anybody
disapprove of this.


>I would be happy to help in making this competition real (but this way
>I won't be able to join it damn it!)

... and the most important thing? what is the name of the competition?
RevCodeMayhem?  :-))))