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 first meeting of my Computer Circuit Fundamentals lecture class for the eleventh week of the second term, I gave them their next two exercises. The first was just to add input messages for each element of the ten-large single dimension numerical array to be entered, since when they ran the sample program initially, they didn't know that they had to enter each number separately then press the enter key.

I know there is a group that has a programming style they term "barbaric", where, instead of coming up with a streamlined code that they can put in a loop, they instead use several if-then-else statements. This worked fine for several previous programs we had that only and three branches, but not for those with several dozen branches to execute.

For the next exercise, they could have used conversion of the number to ASCII then displaying that number, but that only works for numbers 1 to 9. For number ten, they either have to separate the tens from the ones and display both, or they could have just displayed the one and the zero as the only two-digit number they had to show, and only once.

The exercise after that asked them to sort the array from lowest to highest. What surprised me about this was that I already gave them an idea from the sample program I provided the sort of program they had to make afterwards, and when they didn't guess it was sorting, I had to determine why.

The reason, it turned out, was that they did not take up sorting in their initial programming course, something that surprised me.

All they knew was how to determine the largest and/or the lowest value in an array, but not how to rearrange them in any order.

So I had to revise their exercises, making the second new exercise just finding and displaying the largest of the elements.

Then I made a third new exercise, the sorting, after asking them to research it of course. Not that I was able to find very informative sources when I looked in the net myself.

Session 1413 was assumed to know certain basic skills from pre-requisite subjects that weren't taught. Class dismissed.