I think we should solve this as this part is not hard to fix.
I think this is a good idea. Do you have a suggestion for hints we can show? These can both be in the form of the hints on the right side, or admonition blocks we can add in the instructions (highlighted “extra” content).
I agree. Same question as above.
For context, this exercise was written before we had a tree / structure for the syllabus, and thus, it has not yet been improved upon. We can make that happen.
unless I’m missing something, there’s nothing on that page about returning functions from functions?
To echo what nico has said, I found this exercise very strange. I was going to post the same things that they have.
The hints don’t have anything useful in them, the instructions for the first 2 tasks are basically identical and there’s nothing obvious to suggest that you just add vs multiply.
The other exercises all have some context to them for example: “The arcade hall keeps a separate score board on Mondays. At the end of the day, each player on that board gets 100 additional points.” This one doesn’t…
This exercise genuinely feels like its bugged or is an incomplete draft.
You’re not missing anything. The exercise notes really don’t mention returning functions (although, the examples do) and that’s because closures are not necessarily all about functions returning functions, it’s just the simplest way to create a closure. Did you check out the Closures concept page? It has a bit more details than the exercise notes.
Your criticism (and others’ for that matter) is valid tho. I think the docs for this exercise can be made more clear and if you have any particular suggestions on how to do that, you’re welcome to share.
I think what’s happened is that I’ve completed more of the learning track (or perhaps just the closures exercise) and I can now see more of the content of that page.
The screenshot I posted earlier was all I saw when navigating to that link (it was also posted by themetar), now I am seeing significantly more stuff in there, so I think that’s added to the confusion. It certainly would’ve helped in making the exercise make more sense if I had the extra info when trying to tackle it.
Presumably that also happened with Nico above "That’s odd, I don’t recall seeing that explanation before, was it added recently? "
Maybe there’s a bug with the closures concept page?
I can confirm that there is something wrong:
I also have not yet solved the exercise associated with the concept. Opening the closure concept page, I only see the shorter version (matches screenshot above).
Opening the same URL in a new browser without being logged in to Exercism, I see a much more explanatory article on closures. I suspect, this is the version one sees after solving the exercise.
This is by design. Please see concepts about.md. While the introduction.md might need more information in this situation, having more information display after you have completed the exercise is intended.
There are some tracks that do make the concept introduction.md match the about.md. But others - like JS and Python have shorter introdcution.md files, with longer about.md files.
The logic being that students would read the concept introdution.md to get grounded, then learn by working through the exercise introduction.md + instructions.md and examples (and whatever documentation links are provided). Afterward, they then get more details/caveats/avenues of exploration in the concept about.md doc, should they want to refer back to the concept later, or explore further. Usually, the concept about.md is a superset or combination of the concept introduction.md and/or the exercise introduction.md.
You can see an example of this on the Python track for Little Sister's Vocab, which is the concept exercise for strings (``str`):
Little Sister's Vocab (strings) introduction.mdLittle Sister's Vocab (strings) instructions.mdMore information/documentation here : Building Tracks on the website.
But if I’m not logged in, I have completed the corresponding Concept Exercise?
To the workflow design choices: I don’t ask to change that, but I wouldn’t do this. It’s like expecting people to look again into a book they have read to find the sequel in there now. That’s very uncommon and surprising. Usually you read the whole enchilada first and then do exercises that refer back to what was in the document. At least there should be hints about available goodies in the very same place when the exercise is done (and don’t forget to flush the browsers cache to get them).
Maybe. And agree it would be good to have a prompt to the student to “revisit” or “review additional details” in the about.md once they’ve completed the exercise. And I think some mentors encourage that as well during mentoring sessions.
However, we did (and still do) get loads of complaints about “too many words”, and “too much text” and “too many details to pay attention to” for concept/exercise introductions (on the Python track at least), so this was a way to avoid some of that - the same way that approaches docs (accessible after an exercise has been completed) dive into multiple ways of solving an exercise in detail – but not before a student has worked through the problem at least once.
That doesn’t meant that things don’t need to be adjusted for certain concepts or exercises – everything can be improved. And I do find myself changing the way intros and about docs are structured more and more as I start to work on more complex or compound concept exercises for the track.
It also doesn’t meant that the docs have to be different lengths, or have different content. It just means that there is flexibility in what goes where, and there is a timing thing that kicks in: introduction.md shows ahead of exercise completion, and about.md shows after.
Edited to add – the logged-out/non-joined behavior is something different. As I recall, @iHiD had a write-up of the reasoning for it, but I can’t find it at the moment. Something to do with non-joined track members having full details of what they might learn in order to decide to join or not.
It’s 100% SEO.
I think I approve of this approach. This way a student is going through the necessary knowledge base at least three times, once before the exercise is started, once while solving it and once after it is done, so higher chance to actually learn things.
However I do think that many students would completely miss that there is extra info to read after they’ve done the exercise so there may be need for some sort of prompt or hint to make it clear that you can go back to read extra. (Assuming that there is any extra)
To get back to the topic at hand, in particular for the Closures exercise, improvements can be made, I think.
I don’t know if I’ll have time to restructure any of it so if anyone else may have ideas, they’re welcome. Otherwise, well, I may get to it eventually…
If the content is 90% the same, I personally would not want to read nearly identical content to try to find the bit that is different. But maybe I’m an outlier.
Hey I’m not a mod but I’m agreeing with you. Although I somewhat enjoyed functions calling functions after being frustrated for perhaps 40mins and then calling on some old discrete mathematics theory. But that isn’t what this exercise is about. It’s not supposed to challenge anything else much other than perhaps previous concepts taught. Closures, if I’ve got this right, is basically scope defining of variables and such. And this shouldn’t be this difficult to learn and practice.
Unfortunately the mental model for enclosing values and/or variables is very hard to a lot of people and doesn’t exist in all programming languages.
I agree with this, tbh. I had to google a lot of the terms in this exercise. It definitely assumes a lot of previous knowledge of geometry, which I hadn’t even acknowledged since my senior year of high school and that was over ten years ago at this point, lol. I definitely had to research a lot of what it was even asking before I could even solve this.
Can you explain which knowledge of geometry you needed exactly? We can amend the exercise instructions to include this knowledge so it’s no longer required.
Agree! I think there is the same issue with some other topics in Learning Mode
Honestly, it was just very difficult for me to figure out what was meant “translate”, “scale” as for as coordinates went. I didn’t even understand what the functions were supposed to do. If I hadn’t googled it what those terms meant in terms of coordinate pairs and figured out that “translating” was referring to addition and “scaling” was referring to multiplication, I probably wouldn’t have been able to deduce it by the instructions alone.
I also had to consult Chat GPT for the proper syntax as well because that wasn’t immediately obvious. Nothing in this exercise felt like it was based upon previous concepts.
Thank you for sharing.
I think a quick intermediary change we can make is explain what translate and scale are, and how they are supposed to work.
This was merged