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Have you ever written software to do your homework for you?

notfred

Lifer
I don't mean written software as homeowrk, but had homework that wasn't related to programming, but which was easier to solve by writing a program to do it.

I wrote a short (about 40 lines) program today to solve a statistics problem for myself today. The professor wanted us to calculate 32 different probabilities by hand to fill in a table. My program generates and fills in the table itself.

I don't know if I really saved much time, but it was certainly a lot less monotonous this way.
 
My TI-83+ is filled with programs like that. I'll get bored in a class, generally my math class, pull it out, start programming. Generally they are fairly simple programs, such as a GPA calculator, a program that randomly prints a word around the screen (like.. "i'm bored"), a quadratic formula solver, and a few other little programs. Ti graphing calculators use a modified Basic, which you can write on the calc, and Assembly, which you can't write on the calc.
 
Originally posted by: TheLonelyPhoenix
Every now and then I'll do a 30 second MATLAB project to put off buying a new graphing calculator just a little bit longer.
Graphing calculators suck; don't bother buying one.
 
I'm 4th year astrophys. Whatever my standard scientific calc can't handle, mathematica can. And the stuff I need mathematica for can't be done on a TI-graphing calc...

But back on topic... sort of yeah. I had to write a program for an astro assignment once, and there was a related question that didn't require any programming, but it was easy to modify my original program to do that question too...
 
Originally posted by: RaynorWolfcastle
Originally posted by: TheLonelyPhoenix
Every now and then I'll do a 30 second MATLAB project to put off buying a new graphing calculator just a little bit longer.
Graphing calculators suck; don't bother buying one.

Well, I can't use my laptop during tests, and I'll be damned if I have to do phasor transformation by hand ever again...
 
I've not done it for homework, but have written it for games. The SFC series of games use flat text files for ship data - hardpoint locations and the like. Well, I had been making new 3d models for the game and editting the text files by hand for the longest time. Just got tired of it and realized for all the time I spent manipulating the stupid text files, I could have made a half dozen more ships.

So...I just wrote a program to do it for me. Fancy little GUI and everything. Drag-and-drop, whole nine yards. Which, with Visual C++, is always a treat.

It's definitely a weird feeling when you are working on something and it occurs to you..."Gosh, I could get this done a whole hell of a lot faster if I wrote a program to do it for me". LOL.
 
Absolutely. I used to do it all the time when in school. I had also written a little chat program that worked across the link used by the TI-82/3 calculators so that I could send answers to my buddy during trig/calc tests.
 
Originally posted by: Descartes
Absolutely. I used to do it all the time when in school. I had also written a little chat program that worked across the link used by the TI-82/3 calculators so that I could send answers to my buddy during trig/calc tests.

Teacher didn't notice the wire running between desks? 😕
 
Originally posted by: TheLonelyPhoenix
Originally posted by: Descartes
Absolutely. I used to do it all the time when in school. I had also written a little chat program that worked across the link used by the TI-82/3 calculators so that I could send answers to my buddy during trig/calc tests.

Teacher didn't notice the wire running between desks? 😕

No. Buddy and I sat in the back along radiators, and the class was sufficiently large such that the teacher wasn't going to notice a tiny black wire between two desks.
 
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