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Reduce the scope of the conditionals-if concept + exercise #2365

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sanderploegsma opened this issue Sep 20, 2023 · 2 comments · Fixed by #2508
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Reduce the scope of the conditionals-if concept + exercise #2365

sanderploegsma opened this issue Sep 20, 2023 · 2 comments · Fixed by #2508
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discussion x:action/improve Improve existing functionality/content x:knowledge/intermediate Quite a bit of Exercism knowledge required x:module/concept Work on Concepts x:module/concept-exercise Work on Concept Exercises x:size/medium Medium amount of work x:type/content Work on content (e.g. exercises, concepts)

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@sanderploegsma
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The conditionals-if concept currently introduces too many concepts at once: if/else statements and switch statements. The latter is already covered in the switch-statement concept (which is unlocked after conditionals-if) and should probably not be introduced earlier.

The corresponding concept exercise blackjack has the same problem: it is designed to have students use a switch statement for the first task. Although it's possible for students to solve it without a switch statement it quickly becomes tedious to write 14 if statements in one method. I can imagine it would turn students off, to be honest.

We should therefore revise the concept and corresponding concept exercise to focus only on introducing the if/else statements. Especially the exercise needs a big overhaul (it did anyway, see #2311).

@sanderploegsma
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sanderploegsma commented Sep 20, 2023

Also I would propose to rename the concept to if-statements or if-else-statements, since "Conditionals If" just reads awkward on the syllabus: https://exercism.org/tracks/java/concepts/conditionals-if

@sanderploegsma sanderploegsma added discussion x:action/improve Improve existing functionality/content x:knowledge/intermediate Quite a bit of Exercism knowledge required x:module/concept Work on Concepts x:module/concept-exercise Work on Concept Exercises x:type/content Work on content (e.g. exercises, concepts) x:size/medium Medium amount of work labels Sep 20, 2023
@sanderploegsma sanderploegsma self-assigned this Oct 4, 2023
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This can help make your code more readable, maintainable, and less prone to bugs.

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discussion x:action/improve Improve existing functionality/content x:knowledge/intermediate Quite a bit of Exercism knowledge required x:module/concept Work on Concepts x:module/concept-exercise Work on Concept Exercises x:size/medium Medium amount of work x:type/content Work on content (e.g. exercises, concepts)
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