This reminds me of a high-school class I once took that gave students a gameboard and list of moves (over several games), and had us attempt to deduce the rules of the game being played. The focus...
This reminds me of a high-school class I once took that gave students a gameboard and list of moves (over several games), and had us attempt to deduce the rules of the game being played. The focus on "adversarial thinking" and how to poke and prod a black box system to create a working model of its behavior was both great fun and highly applicable to my career.
If you want to play with the languages, there's links to the coursework and exercises which apparently uses Racket and Pyret.
The article also links a PDF paper that goes into more depth about the use of "mystery languages" for teaching.
This reminds me of a high-school class I once took that gave students a gameboard and list of moves (over several games), and had us attempt to deduce the rules of the game being played. The focus on "adversarial thinking" and how to poke and prod a black box system to create a working model of its behavior was both great fun and highly applicable to my career.
If you want to play with the languages, there's links to the coursework and exercises which apparently uses Racket and Pyret.
The article also links a PDF paper that goes into more depth about the use of "mystery languages" for teaching.