A Magercise is a flexible exercise designed to provide help according
to the needs of the student. For example, some students will simply complete
the exercise given the information and the task list in the Magercise body;
some students may want a few hints while others may want a step-by-step guide
to successfully complete a particular Magercise. Students may use as much or
as little help as they need per Magercise. Moreover, since complete solutions
are also provided, students can skip a few Magercises and still be able to
complete future Magercises requiring the skipped ones.
Each Magercise has a list of any prerequisite Magercises, a list of skeleton
code for you to start with, links to necessary API pages, and a text
description of the Magercise goal. In addition, the following information is
available via five buttons:
- Expected behavior: Launches an applet illustrating the desired
behavior from your applet.
- Table of contents: Brings up the table of contents for the course
notes and the list of magercises.
- Help: Gives you help or hints on the current Magercise (an
annotated solution).
- Solution: The
<applet>
tag and Java source resulting in
the expected behavior.
- API Documentation: A link directly to the online API documentation.
There are three fundamental magercise types:
- "Blank screen"
-
The programmer is confronted with a "blank screen"; i.e., the programmer
creates the entire desired functionality.
- Extension
-
The programmer extends the functionality of an existing,
correctly-working program.
- Repair
-
The programmer repairs undesirable behavior in an existing program.
Where possible, the programmer shall be relieved from chores that are
irrelevant or unrelated to the technique or concept under examination.
Where reasonable, a common thread shall run through the magercises
for each lab section.
Given the constraints of the technique or concept under examination, the
magercises shall be made as interesting or useful as possible without
presenting an overly-complex programming problem to the student.
Magercises shall execute via the web unless a particular concept related to
non-web execution is required or the browser does not support the capabilities yet.
In addition, magercises that must access Java features or library elements causing
web security violations are not executed on the web.
Copyright © 1998 MageLang Institute.
All Rights Reserved.