Comment by mratzloff
9 years ago
Our school actually had a pretty good programming curriculum for the time: Basic, Pascal, and C++. Unfortunately the instructor for all three progressed through the topics at an utterly glacial pace. As a result I would finish the assignment in the first 10 minutes and alternate between helping others and surreptitiously playing Master of Orion from my homework diskette.
Had a similar experience. VB class in HS was my first programming experience, but me and another guy finished the end of course project in the first month. It was a playable tic-tac-toe game. Instructor said if we made the computer actually play a side, we'd get 100s for the class. Took me a day or two to write an algorithm for it combining identical game states, the other guy spent a few days making an absurd mess of nested if statements to cover every possibility. Spent the rest of the year alternating between making more games (a clone of Space Invaders and then the beginnings of a clone of Legend of Zelda) and playing an NES emulator, which the instructor overlooked. Probably wouldn't have approved if she'd noticed we had it saved locally in the school machine and the emulator was called NESticle, complete with an icon depicting a hairy sack...