Unit 6 Lesson 8 Written Response

CS Principles
,
1

Hi all,
I have a very smart student. 1500+ SAT. Better coder than me. He refuses to do the written responses in paragraph format and will not use sentence starters.
Do you think he would get awarded points for this written response for Unit 6 Lesson 8?
This question is based on the project you submitted.

Consider an iteration statement in your program.

• Describe how this iteration statement works.

• Explain how the loop ensures that each icon (e.g., “icon0”, “icon1”, …, “icon19”) gets updated.

Below is his response:

The loop which sets the colours of each icon is as follows:

  1. Dimensionalizes i and sets it to 0.
  2. If i is less than 20,
  3. Calculate the random size.
  4. Set the position of “icon” + String(i) to a random value. It can go off the screen by size pixels.
  5. Set the size to the computed size.
  6. Increment i.
  7. Go back to Step 2.

The literal “icon” + String(i) gets the ith icon.

2

I cannot vouch for how viable this will be. However I agree with the student in this case, it is extremely dumb to write a paragraph for something so self explanatory and also bad practice for programmers to write paragraphs for how stuff works as comments (they should personally ditch it in my opinion) and grade based on how clearly the code can be read and graded on comments that student can leave to clarify it (since it would be more practical) or even have them learn about making readme docs in markdown that would be way more useful and helpful because that’s probably the only spot where a possible paragraph would exist and would teach a way of guiding new users to the software that is being presented