This is really good! What a clever assignment that your programming teacher gave you! Details are so important in all of life. Good Luck!
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| Programming a Sandwich? |
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Name: James Feher College Attending: None(High School Senior) “I would like you all to list the steps to making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich,” my computer programming teacher told us at the end of our first day of class. Following this instruction, my classmates and I looked at each other with confused faces, each wondering if we had accidentally signed up for a cooking course. A glance around the room would reveal that we were in fact in a computer lab, but what then was the point of the assignment? Despite the questions we asked, our teacher would not reveal a thing besides that he was absolutely serious about the assignment. When the bell rang we all left, and it was decided that our teacher was out of his mind. Arriving at home, I still could not believe that instead of programming, I was stuck making a sandwich that I could not even eat. Though I remained skeptical of the assignment, it was still homework nonetheless. I began by creating a list with the hope that I would come up with even the smallest reason for the assignment; however, being no closer than in class to realizing the point of my teacher’s assignment, I decided to try expanding my list. I went through it multiple times, and even imagined myself actually making the sandwich while I wrote down the steps. The amount of small tasks that I discovered were involved in the process was absolutely incredible. With ease I was able to create a list many times larger than my original and yet, as I would find out the next day, it was still incomplete. The depth to which this process could be broken down fascinated me, and through this process I was able to understand my teacher’s assignment better; however it was not until the next day that it really started to make sense. In class, my teacher had prepared one of the desks with the ingredients necessary for creating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He began his presentation by asking a student to read his list while my teacher did exactly what that student said. It was not long before my teacher’s knife was scraping the top of the jelly jar or smearing peanut butter on his desk. After each error he moved on to another student’s list. This hand’s on application of our assignment finally made his intentions clear to me. Though he used an essentially simple process, the idea behind it is constant for many other applications including programming. Any mistake in sequence or logic detracts from the end product, in this case an edible sandwich. At this point I was still new to programming, but as the course developed I found this lesson to be increasingly useful. Every day I find myself applying the lessons from my first computer programming assignment. The order of every move in a game, every line of code in a program, and every word in this essay are important to the end product. |
