@Martin Hebel & others project-ideas for educational context: vizualize pointer

StefanL38

Hello Martin,

I'm not sure if you still read this forum

Hello all other people working in an educational context with the propeller

Hello Parallax-Team this might be an idea for an educational democode-contest


I have an idea where the students doing this job AND all propeller-usesrs can benefit from:

how about creating SPIN-code that vizualizes pointers to strings ?

To get more into details. The students that are learning about pointers to strings write democode
that vizualizes a part of the RAM containing the ASCII-codes characters and demonstrates how
the string is read from the RAM

'RAM-Adress:          100 101 102 103 104 105
'contains ASCII-codes  65  66  67
'which means:           A   B   C
                            !
'actual-pointervalue is 66---

more ideas:
democode showing the differences of accessing bytes, words, longs
and what happens if you try to access longs via byte[noparse][[/noparse]longpointer], long[noparse][[/noparse]bytepointer] etc.

I suggest to use Extended_FDSerial as this requires no additional hardware to use it
or to modify the TV-, VGA-object, to make it FULLY command-compatible to Extended_FDSerial
so just change the obj-filename from tv, to vga, to Extended_FDSerial for changing the outputchannel
and all output-command are still working

The students that have developed this vizualizing will have understand it very well.
And then we have material that is very EASY to understand that hobbyists can learn it


best regards

Stefan

StefanL38

Hello,

I didn't wrote something like

"any comments on this ?"

and the question would you be interested in something like this ?
would this help to improve your programming abilities?

or is it NOT nescessary because for everybody arrays and pointers to strings are "a piece of cake"

best regards

Stefan

mpark

Seems to me that a student could get more out of just writing a little program and putting a bunch of print calls into it. If I understand what you're getting at, the visualizer is little more than a memory dump. I should think a student would learn more by writing his own memory dump.

Oldbitcollector (Jeff)

Understanding pointers & strings has been one of the most frustrating parts of learning
the Propeller. I'm a "visual learner" so anytime something can be demonstrated/taught
in a manner which allows me to visualize something tangible, it is always welcome.

I'm just starting to get a decent handle on it, but not comfortable enough to create
that document. (yet)

OBC

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StefanL38

Hello,

@mpark: to me it seems that your state of beeing a bloody beginner is so long ago that
you hardly can remember it. And your comment sounds a little bit arrogant to me.
of course a student of informatics will go far beyond this point of knowledge.

I have TWO intentions.

First intention is that beginners that know some basics could create something like this.
On the way from a bloody newbee that knows REALLY NOTHING to ultra-expert there is a
point where a project like this is interesting and challenging but doable.

Second intention is: there are a lot of hobby-users that work with the propeller but don't want to dive deeply
into programming. For people like that such a visualisation would help a lot.

Maybe there should be given a tiny bit of code that stores a string "hello world" in the RAM
And then the thing to do is analyse this code by debugging via output of pointervalue, value of byte in RAM etc.
.
@OBC: my intention is not that somebody who already knows all the details about this should writedown a document
in two hours. I think of somebody on the level you describe. I guess writing the debugoutput and test it step by step
develop it further step by step would be doable for you.

But as all of this is a hobby where everyone is - OF COURSE - completely free to decide if he wants to do something like this or not

So OBC what are you thinking about it ?

best regards

Stefan

mpark

StefanL38 said...
First intention is that beginners that know some basics could create something like this.
On the way from a bloody newbee that knows REALLY NOTHING to ultra-expert there is a
point where a project like this is interesting and challenging but doable.

That's pretty much what I was getting at. Not sure why you think I was being·arrogant.


·

Praxis

My only comment on this thread is" @#$&^#*&^

Post Edited (Praxis) : 10/25/2008 7:06:45 AM GMT

Paul Baker

Please refrain from using vulgarities on the forum, including thier abbreviated form.

Thanks,

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Paul Baker
Propeller Applications Engineer

Parallax, Inc.

statemachine

·Stefan,I have been very interested in·your posts as of late.You truly enjoy teaching.I think it's a great idea.Bry.

Post Edited (statemachine) : 10/25/2008 1:45:23 PM GMT