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 third week of the second term, I was able to find two programs that integrated display to the screen, accepting keyboard input and displaying processed information to the screen for assembly language.

The problem was, that it was in the middle of a program with loops, conditional jumps, and several complex operations such as compares, shifts and rotates.

So I had to spell out the purpose of each new command on the board, which was a reverse of what we did last time, since this time I gave them the file of the program that was the sample instead of having to type it out.

First I talked about the Load Effective Address command, to clear the misconception of some students that a variable’s name is its address.

Good thing the students already had a background on switching theory, which made it easy to come up with the explanation for the “exclusive or”, “and” and “or” commands (the grammar checker wont’ accept that previous set of words without the quotation marks).

What entailed the most explanation though, was the compare command, and the three flags that it affected. I had to give specific examples about what it means, and at the same time I was surprised that we had to go back to having specific examples on how to represent signed and unsigned numbers using a specific number of bits.

Maybe I will give them more instances of when the zero, sign and overflow flags are affected by this command, as well as signed and unsigned conversion.

I was also surprised when I looked at the clock in the hallway and it was already ten minutes past the end of our period. I hadn’t finished discussing the program yet. Partly it’s due to the time it took them to copy the commands, and partly it’s because of the clarifications they asked, which I could not ignore, unlike with a certain student.

Session 1329 either forgot previous lessons or was not taught about it clearly enough. Class dismissed.