Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Using Magic To Teach Computer Programming, Dale F. Reed, Ronald I. Greenberg

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Magic can be used in project-based instruction to motivate students and provide a meaningful context for learning computer programming. This work describes several magic programs of the “Choose a Number” and “Pick a Card” varieties, making connections to underlying computing concepts.

Magic tricks presented as demonstrations and programming assignments elicit wonder and captivate students’ attention, so that students want to understand and replicate the work to show it to friends and family members. Capturing student interest and curiosity motivates them to learn the underlying programming concepts.

Two “Choose a Number” programs are shown where the computer is able to identify …

Efficiently Representing The Integer Factorization Problem Using Binary Decision Diagrams, David Skidmore

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Let p be a prime positive integer and let α be a positive integer greater than 1. A method is given to reduce the problem of finding a nontrivial factorization of α to the problem of finding a solution to a system of modulo p polynomial congruences where each variable in the system is constrained to the set {0,...,p − 1}. In the case that p = 2 it is shown that each polynomial in the system can be represented by an ordered binary decision diagram with size less than 20.25log₂(α)³ + 16.5log₂(α)² + …