It could be that they don't understand (clearly enough) the material that you present immediately before you present the arrays. Is the following accurate?
They can handle the basic drawing canvas. Draw a line from here to there. Draw a bezier curve with these parameters. Draw a figure with these parameters. They can handle iteration. Draw a line. Move down. Draw a line. Move down. They can barely handle the two notions together. Draw a complex figure here, then change the parameters. To understand that, they need to be very clear about: 1. The input parameters 2. The figure specified by the input parameters (regardless of position) 3. Where the figure would appear when rendered in the drawing area 4. Accumulation of successive figures in the drawing area Maybe it would help to ask them to explain, using these four concepts, how the drawing area is filled in. Once they have a firm grasp of these pre-requisites, they have a chance of understanding what arrays are useful for. Arrays are just a way of storing parameters as you generate them. They're most useful when you want to compute (concept 2) or render (concept 3) a figure in a different order from the order in which you figure out the parameters. Best wishes, Bruce Esrig Volunteer, IxDA NYC On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 2:17 PM, Leonardo Parra Agudelo < lpa...@uniandes.edu.co> wrote: > > Hi all, > > I have been teaching how to program to non-engineers, mostly designers, > artists and a few musicians, and it all goes well until we hit the arrays. > At this point, it gets tricky. I have tried a few different approaches, but > since many of you here have gone through the learning process, or teach > programming, I was wondering which methods had worked for you, and what do > you think could be improved when you compare your learning process, to some > other strategies you're familiar with. > I'm using processing. > You can take a look at some of the exercises here: > http://design.uniandes.edu.co/medios/cursos/dise3308-091-02 > > It's all in spanish, but click around. > > : ) > > Leonardo. > > > Leonardo Parra Agudelo > Full Time Faculty > Design Department > Architecture and Design School > Universidad de Los Andes, > Bogotá, Colombia > [57-1]-3394949 xt 3268 > > > > > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
