Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2006 16:28:14 -0500 From: Troy Vasiga Subject: Feedback on IOI Syllabus Tom, This is last minute (literally: I think I have about 3 more hours before the 30th of November is done). I do have some comments (I will use the original paper page numbers from the paper itself) page 204, Section 6.1.1 -- I guess I wonder exactly what is meant by "Not needed" when applied to Circle. Certainly, students should know what a circle is, but not necessarily the equation of a circle (either in the real or complex plane). There have been interesting circle questions (or at least questions that involve points on a circle). page 204, Section 6.1.2 (DS2) -- I do wonder exactly what is meant by knowing "Universal and existential qualification". Certainly, students should know what "All", "None" or "Exists" mean in a natural language sentence. But, should also know the word "the" and "a" and other kinds of words. These seems like a very tricky thing to quantify (no pun intended). page 207, PF3 -- pointers and references: If there are going to be trees, students will need pointers to deal with trees (unless they are complete trees with no additions or deletions). So, in fact, the idea of dynamic memory seems to be required, to me. page 211, SE -- I find "software engineering" a strange phrase, mostly since it means different things to different people, but I think your examples here really help clarify things. I think overall this is a great direction for the IOI. I am 100% in favour of moving forward with this syllabus. Thanks for all your work on this. I am ready to stand up and make the case that this is a reasonable, rational, concise, precise description of what we need to know. All the best, Troy (t.v.) -- ()(())(((()))(()())((()((())))((()))((()))))((((()))(()))) Troy Vasiga Lecturer -- School of Computer Science Associate Director, Computing -- Canadian Computing Competition mail: School of Computer Science University of Waterloo Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1 email: tmjvasiga[at]REMOVETHIScs.uwaterloo.ca www: http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~tmjvasiga phone: (519) 888-4567 x36937 fax: (519) 885-1208 (please include cover page) office: DC 3112