Introductory programming courses in computer science aim at building an effective foundation for the development of programming skills. A prudent way to develop these skills is by emphasizing problem solving and logical thinking. This paper proposes a games-based approach, as a way of engaging students and developing these skills. Common mistakes of novice programmers in traditional courses are summarized. Word and number games are used to illustrate the potential benefits of a games-based approach, which minimizes such mistakes.

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An adaptive bottom up Web news extraction approach based on human perception is presented in this paper. The approach simulates how a human perceives and identifies Web news information by using an adaptive bottom up clustering strategy to detect possible news areas. It first detects news areas based on content function, space continuity, and formatting continuity of news information. It further identifies detailed news content based on the position, format, and semantic of detected news areas. Experiment results show that our approach achieves much better performance (in average more than 99% in terms of F1 Value) compared to previous approaches such as Tree Edit Distance and Visual Wrapper based approaches. Furthermore, our approach does not assume the existence of Web templates in the tested Web pages as required by Tree Edit Distance based approach, nor does it need training sets as required in Visual Wrapper based approach. The success of our approach demonstrates the strength of the perception based Web information extraction methodology and represents a promising approach for automatic information extraction from sources with presentation design for humans.

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Formulation of fast algorithms for the computation of the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) has been a subject of research for quite some time. It is well known that when a symmetry is present in a signal, it reduces the information content and hence we may expect that the use of symmetry will reduce the complexity in the evaluation of the DFT of the signal. In this paper, the DFT of a symmetric signal is evaluated using the well-known radix-2 fast Fourier transform (FFT). Two different kinds of symmetry, the even-symmetry and the odd-symmetry, are considered. Symmetry RelationsLet z ( n ) be a causal signal of length N . z ( n ) possesses even-symmetry (referred to as positive symmetry [l]) when z ( n ) = z ( N -1 -n), n = O,1,2, .., ( N -1).(1) N-1This symmetry is also termed as the reflection symmetry, reflected about the line n = 7.In the frequency domain, the above relation c m be expressed as X ( k ) = w-"(N