zlacker

>>jstrie+(OP)
> As a result, solutions using strings are disallowed on problem sets and quizzes until they are taught. However, the few students who have prior Python programming experience may be tempted to find digit length without loops using a variant of the following (for our purposes) invalid solution.

Wow. this is one of the reasons I hated school. No programmatic reason what given for why a string solution couldnt be used, only an arbitrary reason. Here students may have knowledge from self teaching or whatever, but they are unallowed to use that knowledge because "reasons".

To any teacher that thinks its a good idea to punish students for thinking outside the box: shame on you. All youre going to end up doing is crushing enthusiasm and/or creating drones. Please dont.

>>svnpen+Jm
Strings are disallowed because they are not necessary for this problem and although the solution is shorter, is far more inefficient; it also doesn't demonstrate the algorithmic thinking that the course is obviously trying to teach.

I've taught CS courses before, and have seen plenty of self-proclaimed self-taught know-it-alls who seem to be more stackoverflow-copy-pasters than anything else.

>>userbi+xo
> Strings are disallowed because they are not necessary for this problem

the division examples are not necessary either, thats the point. you can solve it different ways, that doesnt mean one way is not necessary, it just means its different. one may be faster, one may be more readable. If you dont allow different solutions you cant explore the tradeoffs between them.

>>svnpen+To
Generally, the purposes of the exercises in a class is to reinforce the material that has been taught up to that point and to demonstrate that the student can use it.

For example, if early in an elementary number theory class the student is asked to prove that there are in infinite number of primes of the form 4n+3, a solution that just invokes Dirichlet's theorem on primes in arithmetic progressions would probably not be acceptable. That approach does work to show that there are an infinite number of 4n+3 primes, but completely fails to show that that the student understood the material actually taught in class.

It's the exact same thing with the digit counting problem. Solving it by just invoking the built in string length function does little to demonstrate that the student understands the material taught so far.