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.

Because of the difficulty of finding a common free time between the students and the teachers of a subject which most of them would like to change the schedule for, certain abnormal proceedings have to be enacted.

I’m talking about my computer circuit fundamentals lab class, which the acting dean freely admitted was an administrative error in being set for one day and for two hours, when it was supposed to be for three hours straight.

Unfortunately, the class could not just be extended, because some of the students enrolled had another class immediately afterwards. The only recourse was to split the lab class into two sessions of one and a half hours each.

This was fine with the students, so the acting dean had to approve the request.

The room was also changed for the lecture sessions from a classroom to the lab.

This, I put in my reasons, was so that we could go straight to the demonstrations after the lecture, instead of having to wait until the next session.

From the relatively easy “Hello, world” sample program that we had for the first meeting, we went to the one that had user input, processing and output.

This was the program for which an eight-digit binary number was entered, then it was reversed and displayed again. This not only introduced reading from the keyboard, but also using loops, converting the numeric character input in integer value, using a variety of shifting and rotating commands to reverse the order of the bits, then converting from integer back to character value.

Since we only had one and a half hours for this, there was no more exercise afterwards, but that was promised for the next meeting. And, as expected, the “new” students who were not present during the first lecture, were the ones who had the most questions, especially on the previous commands taken.

I indulged their questions, but now I believe they will not anymore take this subject lightly.

I doesn’t help that I told them up to what topic in computer programming (arrays) the previous takers of the subject reached.

Session 1643 may have finally taken a subject they can't excuse their way out of. Class dismissed.