Reminds me of competing in the ACM Intercollegiate Programming Competitions. With 3 students and one computer, you had to solve the problems offline and only spend keyboard time for entering and running your program. It really teaches a skill-set that's hard to appreciate if you always have a computer and the compiler in front of you while working out solutions.
back
1 comments
Yes. I thought that really artificially skewed the scores, though. When we went to the finals one team member (who normally achieved one run, one pass), keep flubbing his entry. His protracted time in the seat meant the rest of us were artificially restricted at getting our problems done. I had an entire program written out but was never able to even type in. I suppose you could argue that we should have managed that resource better, but you cannot realistically predict someone is going to have an off day; it was 'clear' that he understood what the problem was and the next change was going to be successful. Ah well, it was a lot of fun.