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 Computer Interfacing Systems class for the eleventh week of the second term, just like in the dilemma I mentioned with this subject last time, I had all the students working on the computer of the group that has not yet finished the last two experiments.

These are simple input from an external circuit to the parallel port to be read by a program, and input from an external circuit then the same circuit reading the response of the program through the parallel port.

This, I figured, was better than to ask that errant group to have to put in extra man-hours outside of the class schedule just so that they could catch up.

So the group falling behind went to the stations of the students who have finished the experiment, and studied how they were able to make the program and the circuit work.

At the same time, some of the students from the groups that have already finished used their computer and made their program and circuit work just to prove that it was not it is not the computer that was holding them back and that it works just the same way as the other computers being used in the laboratory.

While they finished that, I wrote down their next experiment on the board, which was a reverse of what they did in the previous experiment.

This time, the user will input data, in this case two four bit numbers, using the software. The software will then send it to the external circuit. The external circuit is supposed to subtract the two numbers, and then send back the four-bit result. The last job of the software is to read that from the parallel port and report it back to the user on-screen.

It turns out that they have a direct application of this from their Switching Theory subject last term or two terms ago (I don’t specifically know right now, because I didn’t teach it, although I would want to), where they already took up a four-bit adder, which they only had to tweak a bit, changing the rules of carrying bits to borrowing bits.

Good thing they still carried around all their notes from then.

The only hitch in that was one student who had not taken up Switching Theory, because it is not a prerequisite of Interfacing Computer Systems in the flowchart.

The solution to that: change the flowchart, which is in progress for the next school year anyway.

Session 865 didn’t take the prerequisite. Class dismissed.