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 meeting of my Computer Circuits Fundamentals lab class for the fourth week of the second term, they finished the exercise they chose from the meeting before, which is to read three two digit numbers from the keyboard then display if they are equal, or which one is greater than the other. For some of the students who seemed to find the task overwhelming, I told them to start with getting the two inputs working correctly.

Their main concern though was how to store the six digits (all in all - or maximum).

The easiest, which it seemed only one group bothered with, was to multiply the first digit by a hundred and the second digit by ten then add them all together. It only failed if the user pressed less than three digits then terminated with the enter key.

The others, compared the hundreds digit first, and if they were equal, then compared the tens, and if that was equal, then compared the ones, resulting in several nested if statements.

Another group had more difficulty because the used the stack to store the numbers, and could only access them backwards, with the ones first and the hundreds last, so the comparison had to be done in reverse, and all three comparisons had to be done.

This is unlike the group that compared the hundreds first, which didn't need to compare the others anymore if one is grater than the other.

When they thought they had finished, it turned out the neglected the entry of two or less digits, asssuming three digit numbers would be entered literally, or that numbers of less than a hundred would be entered with one or two leading zeroes.

For one group, this meant being very specific in their entry message.

This also meant abandoning a loop for maximum three executions for entering either of the two numbers, which was what I was hoping they would use, but having three variables for each of the digits prevented them from resorting to a loop for each keypress.

Session 1345 still has limits in their thinking. Class dismissed.