My Favorite Programming Problem to Teach: Digit Length
During the Fall 2018 semester, I had the pleasure of being a teaching assistant for Fundamentals of Programming and Computer Science (15-112) at Carnegie Mellon University, where I am an undergraduate. 112—as the course is commonly known—uses rigorous problem sets to teach algorithmic thinking and much of the Python programming language. Because it is required for many majors and programs throughout the university, students with widely varying academic backgrounds take the course.
As a TA, my responsibilities included leading weekly “small group” sessions. The course encourages interactive learning through guided practice, and these small, TA-led groups are ideal for hands-on learning.
Besides recursion, my favorite topic to teach in small groups was finding digit length. This deceptively simple task actually provides a surprising number of opportunities to explore deep ideas. The problem is stated as follows.
Write a function digitLength(n) that takes a natural number as input (i.e., 0, 1, 2, … – a nonnegative integer) and returns as output the number of digits the input has.
