Beginners Challenges

[Tony Flury]

Is Anyone interested in taking on a Beginners programming challenge? If so i suggest the following :

1) A new thread is started giving the spec to be followed.
2) Questions about ambiguities in the spec can be posted to the thred.
3) Entrants would have one month to post a solution (including any build/execution details).
4) Entrants could use any programming language they choose.

The Winner will be the first entrant which functions correctly, according to the person who set the challenge.

If there are people who are willing to enter. and experienced developers willing to set the challenges, then I am happy to start the ball rolling with the first such challenge.

[nvteighen]

Great! I like the idea of more experienced people setting the challenges.

One month is "a priori" maybe too long... I would set the deadline depending on the challenge.

[lisati]

Sounds like an idea with promise. It might be of value not only to beginners but people who've been around a while who have gotten a little rusty in their programming skills.

[_sphinx_]

Great Tony I appreciate your effort.

[jspolen]

This site has programming challenges of all sorts. Pretty fun and don't take so long to finish each challenge.

http://challenge-you.appspot.com/

[Tony Flury]

Great! I like the idea of more experienced people setting the challenges.

One month is "a priori" maybe too long... I would set the deadline depending on the challenge.

I agree - a month was a starting figure - each challenge would have it's own natural length.

Was thinking it might be nice for some of the experts in the different languages to be able to give comments on style and suggestions for improvements on each entry - bear in mind the setter of the challenge may not be an expert in all languages.

One final point - to make things easier for the competitor, the setter of the challenge should provide example input and outputs so that the competitors have at least one valid test case to prove their code against. It also provides a very good working example of test driven development.

[Alasdair]

We do have a series of weekly programming challenges, they are (were?) mostly easy enough for beginners. The last one is here (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=823446), and was won by red_Marvin. The idea is that the winner posts a new challenge for the next week, but red_Marvin has presumably forgotten to do so. I doubt anyone would mind if you posted the next one.

[Tony Flury]

We do have a series of weekly programming challenges, they are (were?) mostly easy enough for beginners. The last one is here (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=823446), and was won by red_Marvin. The idea is that the winner posts a new challenge for the next week, but red_Marvin has presumably forgotten to do so. I doubt anyone would mind if you posted the next one.

For a start this is a personal view : but I have been developing code on and off for 19 years (most of it large applications) and I would not consider the Mastermind application a beginner problem. (in fact i am not even sure were i would have begun - although i was never any good playing the actual game), and we also bear in mind that beginners are just handlng the syntax of their chosen language.

I was thinking about problems which exerised the basics of the language, would push learning of some of the advanced features, but did not require a high degree of algorithm design and development.

If by setting some beginner challenges we can get people used to their chosen languages we might get some more entrants in the weekly challenge. (and you never know that a weekly challenge might come along that i feel ready to tackle).

[pmasiar]

ProjectEuler.net has 200 challenges ready for you. Of course anyone is welcome to post new challenges, but focus should be on solving existing ones. And most books contain training task/homeworks too.

[JupiterV2]

I voted for entering the challenge but I would also be willing to set my own challenge as well.

[JupiterV2]

ProjectEuler.net has 200 challenges ready for you. Of course anyone is welcome to post new challenges, but focus should be on solving existing ones. And most books contain training task/homeworks too.

True, but ProjectEuler is less about finding a programming solution to a problem (like designing a stack, vector, etc in a language without native support) and more about finding clever mathematical solutions. You'll note that many solutions submitted are not written in any programming language but mathematical equations.

[Alasdair]

Any challenge needs to be general enough to be enterable in all languages, and that in itself creates a barrier below which the difficulty of the challenge cannot easily fall. There are probably not enough new X developers to have a challenge focusing on a syntactic feature of X, for example.

I think what is important for a challenge is to have some kind of 'end result', that makes any challenge entry seem like it was a worthwhile program in it's own right, even if it couldn't be classified as anything more than a simple toy program. The cipher challenge a while back was a good example of this, and it got loads of entries.

Also I'm not sure that with a month deadline, the winner should be the first working entry. That requirement would only be feasible if the challenge was difficult enough to require a substantial effort. It just seems pointless to have a month challenge if it's over after the quickest entry, and if the challenges are easy, like you suggest, that probably won't be too long. However judging entries on merit alone has it's own flaws, because it biases challenge towards more experienced developers (then again, they would presumably be faster too).

[Tony Flury]

for those interested the 1st Beginners Challenge has been posted by me :
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=5266963

I have not set a specific deadline for the challenge, but i have suggested an estimated time frame (1 to 2 weeks) but that of course depends on so many factors.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread - and good luck to any who enters the challenge.