So I was tasked with getting these students familiar with the code. Now these are students who have had just a little intro to programming, either through previous involvement in a robotics team or through an Intro level programming course. I myself would have to spend some time with the code and the API and understand how it all works before I can guide them. I couldn't get my hands on the code before our first meeting, so instead I thought of showing them some other real life code and their applications. To make it fun, I showed them a snippet of the code first and had them try to guess what the application is.
Here are the 4 snippets of code and the applications (the slides are below as well):
1. I am a big fan of FPS games and I thought the students must have played some kinds of those games and it would be a good start to get them excited. So I included the Doom 3 source code as explained at http://fabiensanglard.net/doom3/index.php
2. I had to include the code that started the OSS revolution, so I included the starting point of linux kernel.
3. At this point, I didn't want the students to get overwhelmed to see that code can only be written by a team of very talented software programmers and takes years to write. So I included some code from the project that won the Astro Pi contest (http://astro-pi.org/competition/winners/). The code was written by students just like them and I explained to them what it does and that it would be sent to the International Space Station in an upcoming launch.
4. Lastly, I wanted to include something that would be fun to show that code doesn't always have to have world changing implications. I searched for some cool Raspberry Pi projects and found this: http://www.scottmadethis.net/interactive/beetbox/.
In the end, I told them that it would be great fun to work on this project as a team. In the last slide, I asked them to not think "What can you do with code?", but "What will you do with code?".
Why code from Gaurav Gupta
