Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T07:03:40.605Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Segments: An alternative rainfall problem

Part of: JFP Education Matters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2021

PETER ACHTEN Open the ORCID record for PETER ACHTEN [Opens in a new window]
PETER ACHTEN*
Affiliation:
Institute for Computing and Information Sciences, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, e-mail: [email protected]
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Elliot Soloway’s Rainfall problem is a well-known and well-studied problem to investigate the problem-solving strategies of programmers. Kathi Fisler investigated this programming challenge from the point of view of functional programmers. She showed that this particular challenge gives rise to five different high-level solution strategies, of which three are predominant and cover over 80% of all chosen solutions. In this study, we put forward the Segments problem as an alternative challenge to investigate the problem-solving skills of functional programmers. Analysis of the student solutions, their high-level solution strategies, and corresponding archetype solutions shows that the Segments problem gives rise to seven different high-level solution strategies that can be further divided into 17 subclasses. The Segments problem is particularly suited to investigate problem-solving skills that involve list processing and higher-order functions.

Type
Education Matters
Information
Journal of Functional Programming , Volume 31 , 2021 , e23
Check for updates
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

Achten, P. (2011). The soccer-fun project. JFP 21(1), 1–19, doi: 10.1017/S0956796810000055.Google Scholar
Fisler, K. (2014). The recurring rainfall problem. In ICER 2014, August 11–14 2014, Glasgow, Scotland, UK, ACM. 978-1-4503-2755-8/14/08, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2632320.2632346.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fisler, K., Krishnamurthi, S. & Siegmund, J. (2016). Modernizing Plan-Composition Studies, CIGCSE’16, March 2–5 2016, Memphis, TN, USA, pp. 211–216, https://doi.org/10.1145/2839509.2844556.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hutton, G. (2002). The countdown problem. JFP 12 (6), 609–616, DOI: 10.1017/S095679680100430.Google Scholar
Levenshtein, V. (1966). Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions, and reversals. Soviet Physics-Doklady, 10(8), 707–710.Google Scholar
Soloway, E. (1986). Learning to program = learning to construct mechanisms and explanations. Communications of the ACM, 29(9), 850–858.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Submit a response

Discussions

No Discussions have been published for this article.