Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

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

In my three hour Interfacing Computer Systems session for the sixth week of classes, they worked on their next experiment, which was now on input through the parallel port.

What the students were not expecting was that it was a case of them having to work on the hardware as much as the software. In fact, one student even thought they were already going to use the 8255A chip lecture I had previously.

I guided them through the necessary troubleshooting to find out if their program and their circuit worked.

For one thing, they tried out setting the port memory address to a certain number just to check if it could be extracted then converted to binary.

For the conversion, I told them that if they could not find any built in function for that in visual basic, which they assumed because there was another function for conversion to hexadecimal, they would have to compute it the long way, possibly using loops.

Because of all the checks and double checks involved, they were not able to finish the experiment. We will just continue with it next time, including them trying to access the control word of the parallel port status first.

In my Graphics Two Manual drafting class, I gave them exercises on orthogonal to isometric views with slanted lines and dimensioning.

I posited two samples they were supposed to solve first, but they couldn’t get one that looked like a tilted slide, even when the top and front view looked so simple. In fact, some students said outright that it wasn’t possible, so I challenged them that I would give them a failing grade automatically if it
were the case. Of course they backed out.

So I added a third sample wherein they could pass two out of three.

I also gave them the hint that the supposed difficult one in the sample is related to the first of their two plates for the day.

Because it was a course on drawing, I would have expected that the students would scrutinize everything I wrote on the board first before working, since I wrote all the instructions down. It turns out it was not the case.

I also commended one of the students with consistently neat drawings as their sample if they want to see how to get perfect in each plate, which is now “IS” (15) instead of “W” (10). So those who did get 10 last meeting rejoiced a bit too early.

Session 819 got IS. Class dismissed for the week.