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.

For my class in Interfacing Computer Systems for the eighth week of the second term, the students finally finished their basic parallel port input experiment, even if only to be able to read four bits or a nibble with the computer from the external circuit.

Strangely enough, it was from the read only (at least from the part of the computer) status byte that they were able to get correctly in placed values, but not from the control word, which both internal and external sources can manipulate, and in fact, had to be initialized before any value could be set.

But at least, we are now free to come up with two new simple feedback systems. One where the computer receives data from the outside source then sends out its own response, and the other way around: where the computer sends out signals to an external circuit which then has to reply to the computer.

Since the students already know the fundamentals of parallel port input and output separately, this means they now have to integrate them and know how to go from one phase to the other readily. For the first, it would be software intensive, for the second, it depends on their hardware.

It was good that the students also remembered that I scheduled an exam for them before the midterm break, but since I did not emphasize for them to study, I am setting it for next week, giving them ample preparation both in the programming and the circuitry concepts.

This makes certain that there would be no students that are good in only one aspect to the exclusion of the other in my subject. They have to be skilled in both writing the correct code and wiring the proper electronic component connections.

For the first session of my mechanics lecture class for the eighth week, I gave them several problems from the textbook as a seatwork, but limited to those on projectile motion where the initial angle is upward and positive.

Questions to the teacher were also severely restricted, so it was a bit disappointing that after their stellar performance in the previous exam, where the lowest score was in the nineties for a hundred fifty point scaling, they couldn’t figure their way out in even one item.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that half of the class did not show up, and maybe people were a little too dependent on consultation with the teacher and their peers, but there will definitely be a sort of dressing down in the next meeting when they will be made to realize exactly how simple the analysis of the given questions really are.

Session 839 also did not pass any answers for given the seatwork. Class dismissed.