CS 145 Lecture 10 – Methods and Memory
Dear students, Whoever you are, you need practice with methods. They are a concept that you probably didn’t encounter in your high school math classes, and you have no prior knowledge on which to build here. So, don’t be too hard on yourself if they don’t click immediately. Today, then, we devote our entire time […]
CS 352 Lecture 10 – Adders
Dear students, Learning is a cycle of exposing your inadequate understanding and then shoring it up. So, we start with a task to help you expose any misunderstandings: Write the truth table for a demultiplexer, which has two inputs (in and sel) and two outputs (a and b). (So there should be how many columns?) […]
CS 491 Meeting 4 – Let’s Play
Dear students, Today let’s do a Let’s Play. I’ve selected out a few computer science education games: The Foos Modulo Challenge Gidget Human Resource Machine Let’s play them together and discuss what they do well and what could be improved. Here’s your TODO list for next time: Continue creating your game. Next time we meet, […]
CS 145 Lecture 9 – Blackboxes
Dear students, We have seen methods as a means of capturing a process into a reusable component. Methods have some really nice advantages: They drop us into a smaller world with a smaller problem to solve. Instead of thinking about the grand mission of our program, we think about the baby step of the method. […]
CS 352 Lecture 9 – Muxes, Demuxes, and HDL
Dear students, We introduce today a couple of hardware components that will ultimately help us build memory. They are the multiplexer (or mux) and the demultiplexer (or demux). The mux takes in two inputs and a selector. The selector determines which of the two inputs feeds into the one output: if sel == 0 output […]
CS 145 Lecture 8 – Methods Cont’d
Dear students, Last time we started generating some circle art, but we stopped with only one circle. Once we get that working, let’s add a second random circle. And a third. And a fourth. And so on. We’ll find that the code quickly gets away from us if we simply copy and paste. Instead, we […]
CS 352 Lecture 8 – 7-Segment Logic
Dear students, Today we’re round out our understanding of Karnaugh maps in the ultimate test. We’re going to design the logic to drive a 7-segment display! What is that, you ask? A 7-segment display is one of these: Image courtesy Peter Halasz. It’s called “7-segment” because it’s decomposed into seven independent LEDs, each identified by […]
CS 145 Lab 3 – Methods
Welcome to lab 3! If you have checkpoints from the last to show your instructor or TA, do so immediately. No credit will be given if you have not already completed the work, nor will credit be given after the first 10 minutes of this lab. You must work with a partner that you have […]
CS 145 Lecture 7 – String Cont’d and Methods
Dear students, With Strings at our disposal, our programs are going to start to feel human. We can write programs that process and generate words, and that’s pretty amazing! But we need more practice using them before we determine the authenticity of Shakespeare’s works. Let’s play some Stringo! Generate a String of five characters. Use […]