alice-teacher EVENTS vs Return Functions

[Tony Bowes]

I'd argue that it would depend on the amount of objects to exhibit the same behaviour. 1-2 it's probably easier to implement as individual events, but if you're looking at 10's or 100's you'd be wanting a function to allow some form of code maintainability. Somewhere in the middle would be a grey area where students transition from handling each event independently to seeing the virtues of abstraction.

Tony Bowes

From: alice-teachers-bounces+tony-bowes=stlukes.qld.edu.au at lists.andrew.cmu.edu [mailto:alice-teachers-bounces+tony-bowes=stlukes.qld.edu.au at lists.andrew.cmu.edu] On Behalf Of James Vanderhyde
Sent: Friday, 8 April 2011 3:48 AM
To: Alice educators
Subject: Re: alice-teacher EVENTS vs Return Functions

I don't think there's a difference in efficiency. Which technique is preferable and which is logically easier is a matter of opinion. There may be one difference, though, with how multiple clicks are handled. Try clicking on multiple philosophers quickly in a row. I think the multiple events technique will try to run the handlers simultaneously, which will have weird effects in the scene. With only one event, the clicks will queue up, sort of.

James
--
Dr. James Vanderhyde
Math and Computer Science
Benedictine College
jvanderhyde at benedictine.edu<mailto:jvanderhyde at benedictine.edu>
http://vanderhyde.us/~james/pro/



On Apr 6, 2011, at 3:49 PM, Elaine Demeter wrote:


A few of my students redid the "Learning to Program with Alice" exercise of Zeus zapping the philosophers by using multiple event statements instead of using a boolean return function.

They thought it was "logically" easier to to check for each philosopher (ex: when the mouse is clicked on "SOCRATES") as an event rather than by creating the return function with all of the IF statements. Is one manner was more preferable or efficient than the other?

Elaine
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