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 my Assembly Language lab class yesterday, the students immediately realized that the code I had them analyze in their exam just before the lab was something for them to use so that they could enter up to three digits for their most recent exercise and convert it immediately to its decimal value on a sixteen bit register.

And I had them use all of the eight eight-bit registers that are pre-defined in Assembly, although in reality they could have used only seven, maybe even just six. They would have seen that if they had could use the same code for the second input.

But to help the people who would rather not check for the availability of registers, I introduced to them about user defined variables.

This was where they realized that there is no one command that can transfer values from one user defined variable to another, but only through an intermediary pre-defined register.

And since I started them on two-digit numbers to be added (instead of one-digit like the previous batches) the next exercise was immediately on three-digit to two-digit subtraction, with the error-handling of not accepting non-numeric characters.

The students were also able to find the other method of receiving one character from the keyboard, but not to display it.

They didn't know that was what it was supposed to do though. So I told them they couldn't use it yet. Until they either realize what it really does, or we get to the part where I show them.

There's one group that's not performing at the same pace as the others though, and they somehow still have not taken my suggestion about using the laboratory when they have free time, or at least copying the program to be used at home. The same is true with bringing their own laptops to the school.

There was one who brought out his laptop, but I don't know if he used it for the exercise or not, since he was not at the same table as his group mates, and there were other students watching him.

At least they were well prepared for the exam with photocopies of the ASCII table and printout of their previous exercises.

Session 1839 has the preliminaries of research down, but not enough. Class dismissed.