[racket] universal Pong question

The students are 13-15 year-olds and they have no time to work outside
of class, so I'm afraid going through multiple design ideas might
leave my TA (who's learning Scheme/Racket for the first time this
week) and me as the choke points for progress during the week.

I'll just pick some reasonable design and try to implement it and walk
them through it. Next week, I'm planning to let them do whatever they
want, so there will be plenty of design decision debates then. :-)

Thanks for the input and ideas!

Todd

On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 7:13 PM, Matthias Felleisen
<matthias at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>
> The key to Universe programs is to allocate knowledge in the
> right places. That's called protocol design in the Docs. Once
> you have decided what goes where you can do two things:
>
>  -- make up data definitions for the local state
>  -- decide what messages you need to send back and forth
>        and make up data definitions for those
>
> Since you believe that there are several related and possibly
> equivalent paths, let me recommend a bit of an exercise for
> your class:
>
>  have the students jointly discuss the two ideas above
>  have them come up with two or three different choices
>  and set up some pairs/teams that implement all three of them
>
> When done, have the students demonstrate how the choices affect
> the implementation of the local client and the server.
>
> You may also wish to discuss the results in terms of security
> then. What happens when a bad client joins? What happens when
> a client sees too much about some other client? It's less relevant
> for pong but for many games (battleship is wonderful here, Shriram
> has an implementation, I have an old one from during the design)
> these are obviously interesting questions.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jul 25, 2010, at 3:26 PM, Todd O'Bryan wrote:
>
>> In the three-week intro course I'm teaching, the students have
>> expressed a desire to program Pong played over the network, so that
>> they can play against each other when they get home from camp.
>>
>> I've never done universe programming before, so I'm not sure what kind
>> of messages the worlds should send back and forth.
>>
>> Obviously, each world needs to report on the position of the paddle
>> (left or right) that its player controls, but what about the ball?
>> Should I just let the worlds handle that with on-tick, or should I
>> check that the ball is in the same spot on both worlds every so often,
>> or should I have the universe server control the ball and tell the
>> world everything except their own paddle position each time something
>> changes?
>>
>> I think all of these are reasonable choices, but I'm pretty sure some
>> will be more or less nice in terms of performance, so I'd like not to
>> head down a blind alley.
>>
>> Todd
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>
>