EFFECTIVE TEACHING OF PROGRAMMING CONCEPTS USING LOW RESOLUTION (CHARACTER) GRAPHICS

摘要

For novice students of Computer Programming, the difference between Floating point numbers and Integers (and consequent difference between arithmetic operations on them) appears to be a difficult concept to grasp. In popular languages such as C++ or Java, this difficulty is made more acute by the fact that the same symbol is used for both floating point division and integer division. Without a proper grasp of the difference between these two fundamentally different kinds of numbers, students would also find it difficult to understand that floating point results should not be compared for equality. I was therefore interested in finding a way to reinforce these concepts soon after the students were initially exposed to them.