Lab 11: Instructor's Notes

This lab exercise deals with multidimensional arrays (or if your prefer, multidimensional vectors). It uses them to model a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Conway in 1970 and known as "The Game of Life."

Lab 10 dealt with one-dimensional arrays and vectors in considerable detail. Having another lab exercise about them — albeit multidimensional ones — may seem like a case of overkill. You may wish to omit this lab in order to have time for other important topics such as building classes, linked lists, stacks and queues.

Here are:

• Prelab Questions designed to check if students have read through the lab exercise in preparation for doing the lab exercise. However, as noted above, they may, alternatively, be used as "postlab" exercises that test how well the students understood the lab exercise.
• The lab home page This lab exercise deals with John Conway's game of Life. It uses two-dimensional arrays to store the Life grid, but you could have them use a vector of vectors instead. It can be interesting to see what Life patterns students discover that lead to "interesting" generational changes. Having a "Life" demonstration where these are demonstrated can be a lot of fun.
• Other programming projects from or in addition to those in the textbook that tie in with the material in this lab exercise.
  Also, A gradesheet that might be used with one of these projects.