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.

I was talking about my first Computer Circuit Fundamentals lecture class for the fifth week of the second term. The second program that I asked them to do was to check four of the keyboard status values and display their status on the screen.

There was a bit of a confusion when I asked them how many messages they were going to display. The correct answer was four: one for caps lock, one for the numeric pad lock, one for the insert or overwrite key, and lastly for the scroll lock. But they answered eight, one for each key being either on or off. That would have been the answer if my question was how many messages they had to prepare with option to display in total.

In the end we had the same group finishing first for both, and surprisingly, this time around it was not the guy who won the math championship last school year, although he did creatively revise their first program to loop if the answer was “yes” since our question was jokingly “are you attractive?” and he wanted the computer to say “I'm not sure about your answer. Please respond again.”

We also found out that from the command line, the insert or overwrite key is not active, although it should be because the command line works the same way as any word processor with the backspace and left arrow key having their own functions, one deleting all the characters to the left that it passes, the other not.

I will have to ask the students to check again the output of the program they made, to make sure that it is reading the status correctly.

In my class of Integrated Computer Systems lab for the week, the groups still continued with the two experiments I gave them before.

One was still having problem getting their seven segment display to show the numbers, even though if they ran the program that went through all the possible combinations, it works.

The problem was that the least significant bit of the output was connected to the power up of the display, so it would only display when odd numbers are entered, but due to the nature of the loop they used, that is when the succeeding even number is shown on the screen, which is what they erroneously wrote down.

I'll continue this tale tomorrow.

Session 1351 was just one digit off in thinking. Class dismissed.