So You Think You Can Program an Elevator

Re:So You Think You Can Program an Elevator by Cshelton on Tuesday January 12, 2016 @04:43PM (#10890630)

This is awesome, I'm closing it now though as well.

This is how teaching should be...this exercise isn't at all about programming and more about how to think. This can be simplified into a drag and drop block language and given to grade school kids as a really good exercise.

Many programmers in the professional world today would really struggle with this because they never learned to actually think, they just "program" (copy paste, edit work already done by others). They don't actually create new things or find solutions themselves.

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Re:So You Think You Can Program an Elevator by tsunamifury on Tuesday January 12, 2016 @05:10PM (#10890803)

Plenty of programmers think, they just don't consider the use case and the user.

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Re:So You Think You Can Program an Elevator by dwd on Wednesday January 13, 2016 @01:53AM (#10892707)

My kids played this first time around, they would have been grade 5 or 6 at the time and got through to level 7 before hacking the level selection and trying random levels to see which ones their approach worked with.

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Re:So You Think You Can Program an Elevator by lfowles on Tuesday January 12, 2016 @08:40PM (#10891757)

This would be a great Blockly[0] demo

[0]: https://developers.google.com/blockly/?hl=en

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Re:So You Think You Can Program an Elevator by MzHN on Wednesday January 13, 2016 @12:29AM (#10892475)

Indeed. Example of a similar game using Blockly, with the option to switch to JavaScript:

http://slushsmackdown.com

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