Challenge Threadᆦ ᆦ ᆦ

[Homicide13]

The point of that is exactly to make you people learn it. What's the point of knowing an Object Oriented Language when you can't use objects?

If that's the case, then I would suggest giving people more time for each challenge - perhaps maybe a week - and instead of making it a competition that ends when people post their work, have them PM their submissions to you and you can announce the winner and the next two runner ups when the competition is over. This would give people more time to work on them and would also encourage more of a level of participation.

As it is now, for someone who doesn't know classes, a time limit of two days is already going to ruin them. Lets say they wake up in the morning, check the forum, and see your post. For me right now there are already only 24 hours remaining. That gives me today to learn what classes are, how to use them, and then how to apply them to something that is already a complex idea such as monster damage/health. Now fortunately for me, one of my school classes was canceled today and I don't have class until later in the afternoon (thought that's still not really enough time to complete your challenge, especially because I have homework and my own personal project to work on). But lets say it's just a normal day for most people in high school (which from what I know is at least a significant portion of the people here), and I wake up at 8:00 and don't come back from school until 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon. Now assuming I don't stay up until 3:00 in the morning and destroy my next day at school, I now only have about 8 hours to work on he problem, plus perhaps another hour or two if I decide to wake up early from school. Heaven forbid I also work a job after school...

Well as you can see this doesn't leave most people with much time. Instead, you could run a new challenge every Monday, structuring them in slowly increasing difficulty to explore certain aspects of code such as classes etc. and people would have a whole week, even the weekends if needed to work on them. And if one person PMs you the solution, there are still the 2nd and 3rd place runner up positions to get, so that doesn't mean everybody else should just stop working and learning as well. Well I think you would get much better results like this anyway.