I tried doing a team practice session last night during our weekly PClub meeting. It didn’t go as well as I had hoped. Several people had to miss practice for various reasons and some people showed up late, so I wasn’t able to put together the teams I had planned.
I had one team work on problems from last year’s Northwestern Europe Regional while the other two teams worked on the five easiest problems (numbers 4065, 4067, 4069, 4071, and 4072) from the 2007 Pacific Northwest Regional.
Both teams working on the five easier problems solved 4065, which is a simple game simulation for Rock, Paper, and Scissors. One of the teams also submitted 4072, which is another game simulation problem, but got a wrong answer on it. After I fixed that team’s parsing, their code worked.
Meanwhile, the team working on the harder problems solved two and attempted a third. However, the team aspect of these “teams” didn’t really work. All submissions were sent by the same coder and I’m not sure everyone really got the idea of writing their code out on paper first. It’s really important to actually implement the code to solve the problem on paper first while someone else is using the computer.
This is probably somewhat difficult for most of the first years as they struggle with syntax issues and depend on the compiler to check their syntax. They were also struggling with coming up with correct algorithms for the problems, so things moved along slowly.
Next week we are taking a bit of a break from the problem solving stuff to do some Robocode. I’m planning on having everyone write the AI to their own tanks and the following week we’ll do a little competition. It’s just for fun. I may even participate.
