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 the two-hour session of my Interfacing Computer Systems class for the ninth week of the second term, we had an exam.

I just wrote the questions on the board while the students were filing in, and handed them out their test booklets.

There were two parts to the exam. The first part was to come up with a visual basic program that would read four bits from the external circuit through the parallel port (obviously with a maximum of fifteen) and get the square of that number. The square would then be sent out again through the parallel port (eight bits this time) and should light the proper sequence of LE diodes.

The second part was to provide the hardware for the connection to be made to the computer, along with the proper pin assignments for each wire.

Now, at the start of the day, I had already told the students that the exam would be open notes, but closed computers. That means that if they believed they would need something out of the several electronic documents that I have given them, then they should print them out.

Unfortunately, because my class was the third subject in a row that the students had for that day, they did not have time to print out and photocopy the necessary documents – or to have a decent lunch beforehand at that.

Thus it was up to me to give the students five minutes each to access the computers and copy down the information they might need to answer the exam. This was already after they were able to read the questions, so the advantage was theirs.

And since there were seventy one percent more students than computers with the files they needed, I had to give them strict rotation for using the computers during the first part of the session.

One student even asked for a few minutes (100 seconds?) to look at the breadboard they were working on in the lab during the last experiment.

Afterwards, I did not erase all that I wrote on the board, but changed the day and made “exam” into “experiment” because the self same problem was their next task in the lab.

This time, in a variation of the schoolyard picking again because of the uneven number of students for a proper group division, I started from the first student to arrive in the lab and asked him which classmate he wanted in the other group. That person then announced who among those remaining he or she wanted in the other group and so on, until everyone had a group.

Session 851 brought no notes. Class dismissed.