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Comment by contingencies | Hacker News Reader

I remember thinking that math classes would be far more interesting if we were allowed to hand in a program to solve the class of problems they were asking us to manually and repeatedly solve, and to bring that program to the exam. Presto: actual comprehension of a nontrivial problem space, real world documentation skills and no rote learning requirements.

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> I remember thinking that math classes would be far more interesting if we were allowed to hand in a program to solve the class of problems they were asking us to manually and repeatedly solve, and to bring that program to the exam

With programmable graphing calculator that's sorta possible. At least, I've done it a few times.

Alas, it was most often banned from exams because "I can't see what you have done there to get that answer".

Also, most of the class ended up using my program for a specific class of problems we had to do in maths. In retrospect, I probably caused some harm by getting my classmates to be that lazy during exams.

How do you have test cases without first solving a number of problems in the space without the program you are writing?

The teacher and the book would explain the case, and the teacher would take us through a few on the board.

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