Alec Siems

Code projects, algorithmic challenges, and cutting-edge technologies... what more could you want in life?

[codeorg]

Using Web analytics to improve education results

Hundreds of thousands of students have already tried our Hour of Code tutorials and the follow-up online course. Using online instruction with “self-grading” puzzles, we get the benefit of measuring student performance on a puzzle-by-puzzle basis.

This graph shows “completion rate” and “dropout rate” across every puzzle in our curriculum. In other words, the percent of students who tried and solved puzzles, and those who tried puzzles, but dropped out and never returned to our system.

Puzzles with low completion rates or high dropout rates are the problematic ones we still need to fix.

Note: this data isn’t brand new. We’ve already fixed bugs to address the most glaring issues you can spot on the graph.

How cool is that? We can use Web analytics to identify when our tutorials aren’t helping students. Soon, we can run A/B tests to improve childhood education results.

[alecsiems-blog]

Coding isn't only for wizards and super-geniuses...

Check out what Code.org is up to! 

[alecsiems-blog]

A government has very few levers that it can pull to help the entrepreneurial culture and technology startups, but one of them is certainly to make sure that the tax regime, the investment and regulation regime and the legislative environment that they sit in are as simple and benign as possible.

Jonathan Gold (in an interview with .net Magazine)

[alecsiems-blog]

9 Page Essay? or Euler Problem...

9 page Essay? ... or Euler Problem?

Personally I think the answer is pretty obvious.  Then again, I'm not the biggest fan of writing papers concerning literature....

Needless to say, I began problem 4 from Project Euler this morning even with a 9 page essay due today.  You've got to get your priorities straight, know what I'm sayin'?  

Well, I'm not going to lie, this one was a pain to complete.  But after finding my very dumb mistake, I laughed, fixed it, completed the problem successfully, then began working on my essay.  It's funny how the simple mistakes will keep you debugging code for hours...

Here's the problem, you should definitely check it out! (And give it a shot!)

My mistake was that I didn't check the magnitude of the value that was a palindrome in order to retrieve the greatest palindrome.  Instead, I simply kept getting the very last palindrome calculated by my program as the answer.  One 'if' statement.... ONE 'if' statement kept me busy on this problem for about an hour.

My Implementation of Problem 4 in Java: on GitHub

Cheers, Alec

[alecsiems-blog]

Prime Number Madness

After breakfast this morning with my C++ professor and a few other engineering students, Austin and I continued our usual morning routine.  Challenge 3 was next in line to be solved and coded using Java. we were extraordinarily excited for this challenge... until we saw that it involved prime numbers that is... 

Problem 3

The thirty minutes of gritting our teeth and relearning java syntax as we coded away at challenge 3 was probably a very useful learning experience, despite the frustration.  Austin figured out this challenge quicker than me.

Because of the size of the number, we were forced to use 'long' data types instead of 'int' data types.  This caused syntax errors as we were initializing the numbers incorrectly; a serious damper to our efficiency.

My implementation at GitHub using Java.

Alec Siems

[alecsiems-blog]

Saturday Morning Success

On this cold, rainy saturday morning, Austin and I decided it was a great time for another Project Euler challenge.  We tackled challenge 2 which involved Fibonacci numbers, a sequence Austin and I are familiar with, although not particularly fans of.  So here's the challenge:

Find the sum of all the numbers in the Fibonacci Sequence that are even and below 4 million.

http://www.projecteuler.net/problem=2

VICTORY!  My first implementation worked flawlessly.... Saturday mornings must be my prime time for algorithm challenges. Unfortunately (not really), Austin took two implementations before he realized that he forgot to initialize his 'total' counter.  Classic mistake.

If you're curious, here are both our implementations (implemented in C++) on GitHub in the file challenge2.cpp

We are going to implement the next two challenges in java... woohoo!

Alec Siems

[alecsiems-blog]

Boot Kali Linux from a USB Drive

With nothing more than a 16GB USB drive, open-source software, and some true grit (and a user-guide...), I successfully turned a 16GB USB drive into a bootable medium for Kali Linux... so basically it's Christmas for me here at SMU.

Here is where I learned how to do it!

Let the hacking... err I mean learning... begin!

Alec Siems

[alecsiems-blog]

Challenge #1

My friend Austin and I have decided to start doing coding/algorithmic challenges everyday (via Project Euler) to exercise our inner nerdiness...

So here's the challenge:

What is the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 under 1000?

http://projecteuler.net/problem=1

SPOILER ALERT!

After my first implementation, I realized that I forgot to account for double counting multiples of both 3 AND 5 (i.e. 15, 30...).  So after recovering from this minor blip in attention quality and thought clarity, I was home-free to finish the algorithm.  My final solution, as well as Austin's final solution, turned out, in fact, to be correct.

Our solutions on GitHub (Implemented with C++)

Looks like Austin beat me in this challenge by using a much more efficient approach... Congrats buddy. Enjoy it while you can.

Alec Siems

[alecsiems-blog]

With cheap teachers, scarce learning resources, and probably a lack of air-conditioning, Vietnamese schools are teaching their students how to program starting in grade 2.  In 2nd grade, I failed to pass the standardized english test...

Enjoy this interesting article about the Vietnamese school system from Neil Fraser!

Alec Siems