Cody,

May humbly suggest that you pick the techniques you are trying to teach and then select problems that rely and utilize those techniques?

By techniques I mean things like subroutines, references, iteration, simple data structures (stacks, queues, etc.), sorting, recursion.

Then create problems that focus on each specific technique and tell the students that's what the problem is meant to illustrate. For example: sorting -- sort an array of dates of the form "12 Jan 2007".

Random mathematical curiosities is a sure way of turning off most young minds. Remember, most people really hate pointless mathematical exercises.

Good luck,
Rob

In reply to Pick the technique first by Anonymous Monk
in thread Simple but thought-provoking programming tasks [OT] by Cody Pendant

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.