Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

The Computer Science students doing their undergraduate thesis on astronomy software were also told by their panelists that they should have a hands-on quiz that can be monitored by the teacher about the progress of the students.

In fact their panelist was even talking about a log-in system for the students and an overriding password for the teacher to be able to access the students' recorded score/s and maybe keep track of the topics in the software that the student has reviewed or not.

I was surprised when they said they had only ten questions so far, when their program covers as much as eleven different topics.

It also seems that these students have not yet had any subject on data encryption because they were just planning to save the users' score in text files.

I warned them against kids already knowing how to hack high score files which are not secure. But then I'm sure that if this is not the first courseware their panelists are aware of, that there are several other theses out there they could use as models for the student progression part of their software.

Of course, if you're talking about several copies of a program running at the same time in a computer lab, what's to prevent an underachieving student from giving his password to one of the smarter kids and letting that person take the quiz for him? There has to be a measure against that also.

When I left them, the students had also agreed on having around 50 questions (a maximum of 5 questions) per topic, that will be randomized when the student takes the test.

They forgot to ask me when we met, but yesterday the students again asked about the occultation, which they had already texted me before but I felt deserved an explanation too lengthy for text messaging.

In fact they asked if the occultation of Mercury would be like an eclipse. I just answered them that occultation as far as I remembered (they should check the text books for verification – no free lunch from me this time either) occultation is when a celestial object moves in front of another body of equal or smaller size as seen from a particular point of observation.

This includes stars covering each other (in the case of a binary system), a planet moving in front of a star, or rarer: another planet, or a planet or a star (usually from a zodiac constellation) moving behind the Moon.

Unfortunately, since their objective has been changed to be of use to amateur astronomers who may not have access to telescopes, occultation loses bearing because it is only of importance to people who can and want to study magnified the bending of light that occurs when the view of a distance object (such as a star or a planet) is obscured by a nearer object with greater gravity (such as the Moon or another planet).

I don’t know if their panel will allow them to remove this topic from their original list because of that fact, or if they will instead, be asked to just cover the subject in more detail to compensate.