Competitors' Perceptions of Questions in Individual Events Rounds.
The practice of judges asking competitors questions at the conclusion of their speeches is an area of interest in the arena of individual events competition. The practice has been most notably used in past years in rhetorical criticism at the National Forensic Association National Individual Events Tournament (NFA-NIET). The practice has undergone scrutiny a number of times. A1984 survey of coaches found support to abolish the practice at the NFA-NIET. A ground swell of support from the student ranks, who were in favor of the question period, saved the practice. Coaches again brought the issue before the NFA-NIET at the 1989 meeting held at Upsala College in East Orange, New Jersey. The coaches voted once again to drop the questioning period; the students, once again, expressed a desire for it to remain as part of the event. This time the coaches' position carried the day. Judges' questions in rhetorical criticism were officially abolished at the NFA business meeting held at the 1989 Speech Communication Association convention in San Francisco. The students raised their concerns for the third time at the 1990 NFANIET, expressing a desire for the questioning process to return to rhetorical criticism. The coaches discussed the issue and decided questioning would remain in the past; the issue was not addressed at all at the 1990 SCA convention in Chicago. A point which deserves attention is the opinion of the student competitor. The student voice was heard and considered in one instance (1984), circumvented the next time (1989) and virtually ig-
Literal and Metaphorical Advocacy: Differentiating the Limited Preparation Speaking Events.
The forensics community has unsuccessfully attempted to differentiate the extemporaneous and impromptu speaking events. By assessing rules and conventions, coaching strategies, and judging practice...
Hedy: A Gradual Language for Programming Education
One of the aspects of programming that learners often struggle with is the syntax of programming languages: remembering the right commands to use and combining those into a working program. Prior research demonstrated that students submit source code with syntax errors in 73% of cases and even the best students do so in 50% of cases. An analysis of 37 million compilations by 250.000 students found that the most common error was a syntax error, which occurred in almost 800.000 compilations. It was also found that Java and Perl are not easier to understand than a programming language with randomly generated keywords, stressing the difficulties that novices face in understanding syntax. This paper presents Hedy: a new way of teaching the syntax of a programming language to novices, inspired by educational methods by which punctuation is taught to children. Hedy starts as a simple programming language without any syntactic elements such as brackets, colons or indentation. The rules slowly and gradually change until the novices are programming in Python. Hedy is evaluated on 9714 programs.