zlacker

Because I am a smart-ass, I did something like this in college. There was an intro course in MATLAB my freshman year, but I'd been programming for several years at that point so I found it too basic to hold my interest. In one of our early labs, we were told to implement a function that calculated a Fibonacci number. I figured that sounded like something MATLAB probably had in its stdlib, and it did, so I wrote a 1 liner and called over a TA to approve my work.

Thankfully this TA agreed with you (as do I). He said it looked good, and I think that's the shortest lab I ever had.

>>wflemi+(OP)
if i was the TA i would have said: "congratulations, for you have not learned anything new"

personally, when something is to basic to hold my interest, i try to find ways to make it more challenging.

>>em-bee+91
I personally learned quite a bit in a similar situation.

In an operating systems class we had a little project to create a command line calculator in C, with the added hoop of using x86 ASM for all control flow and calculations. As this was not a programming class we had a very brief overview of the very basics needed to get this done. I assumed using floating point arithmetic would make this easier, but knew that was not part of the early spec, so I asked the professor in class what version of x86 and he said pentium 1.

I then found and read intel’s documentation for the first generation Pentium. Which completely changed my mental model of CPU’s. Honestly, it was probably the closest collage assignment to how real world coding works and much more useful long term than just implementing some simple algorithms by hand.

>>em-bee+91
I was quite comfortable with writing the Fibonacci function. Writing that would have hardly taken me any longer and would not have taught me anything either.

The thing I did learn, and which I think has paid more dividends in my career than knowing the definition of the Fibonacci sequence, is that knowing your tools well can save you time and effort and reduce the amount of your own code you need to maintain and put effort into.