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.

Yesterday I was talking about the ranking of the students of their group mates (not rating) according to the contribution during a project.

Two of the students of one group of a student who was obsessively grade conscious thought to come up with an agreement with one of his classmates, that he would rank him one if the other would return the favor.

This was done within earshot of another group member. A few minutes later, the first student approached the third, giving him the same deal.

The catch is: a student cannot give two students the rank of one in their group. Which means that the first student, instead of just attempting to get a higher grade by really increasing his contributions to the group instead of using the computer to play games (or, when the net was cut off after seeing him utilizing the computers non-academically, making his requirements for another subject – such as a lab experiment report) which is probably not something he was able to encounter during his very narrow high school experiences.

Now I'll get to to the Computer Circuit fundamentals lab class for the fifth week of the second term. Here I taught them about how to display numbers of two or more digits on the screen, by using the multiply and the divide instructions, which are a bit complicated because even if factors are eight bit, the product can be sixteen bit (and same with sixteen-sixteen-thirty-two) while for division, the dividend can be of a larger number of bits than the quotient, and thus storage will be different.

I also showed them that for division, the integer remainder is also given after the operation. Here they were getting to the part where their programs are now getting to be almost a hundred lines long (due to the repetitive nature of the commands) and thus they had to check their operations at each step by displaying them on the screen, since we are yet to find a debugger, even one of the command-line ones.

So far we have only be able to ascertain that their accepting of inputs is correct, but not yet the operations, due to the copy and past nature.

Session 1355 wants the easy way to get high grades. Class dismissed.