CS 352 Lecture 20 – Assembler
Dear students, In homework, you’ve been working on chapters 1, 2, and 3 of our textbook. Your next homework will be chapter 5, which involves tying everything you’ve built into a complete computer, albeit in HDL form. In lecture, we’ve hit upon chapter 4, which covers assembly for this computer. Today we discuss chapter 6, […]
CS 145 Lecture 18 – If Ladders
Dear students, Let’s start today by writing a little game modeled after an exercise that my kids do at school. It’s called Math Mountain. A number appears at the peak, and another small number appears at mountain’s left foot. The left and right foot are to sum up to the peak. The student must supply […]
CS 352 Lecture 19 – Jumping
Dear students, We now jump into jumps. Normally, the flow of control goes from top to bottom in a sequence of code. But that’s not how it works in our high-level code, where we have loops and conditionals. At the assembly level, there is no such thing as if. Nor is there while or for. […]
CS 145 Lab 6 – Conditionals
Welcome to lab 6! 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 17 – Diversions and Bifurcations
Dear students, We’ve seen the computer as a calculator, crunching numbers. We’ve seen the computer as a chef, calling upon recipes of code. We’ve seen the computer as a philosopher, considering truths about our data. Now it’s time to let those truths drive our computer’s actions. We will see the computer as a pilot, navigating […]
CS 352 Lecture 18 – Alumem and Jumping
Dear students, The next homework requires doing some HDL tricks that I don’t think are necessarily intuitive. Rather than continuing to build on a wobbly foundation, let’s sketch out schematics for some of these components. We’ll visit these: DMux4Way, Inc16, LeastByte (which is not part of any homework), ALU, Bit, Register, RAM8, RAM64, and PC. […]
CS 491 Meeting 7
Dear students, We are in the working phase of developing our games, so most of our time will be spent giving weekly progress reports. Here are some questions we will probably ask you: What’s the riskiest part left to investigate in your endeavor? What three or more specific things will you accomplish before we meet […]
CS 145 Midterm 1
See the PDF.
CS 145 Lecture 16 – Logic Cont’d Cont’d
Dear students, In the late 1800s, logician John Venn invented a diagram for showing ideas of logic. He writes: I began at once somewhat more steady work on the subjects and books which I should have to lecture on. I now first hit upon the diagrammatical device of representing propositions by inclusive and exclusive circles. […]
CS 352 Lecture 17 – Catchup
Dear students, Last week lots of good misunderstandings of memory came up. When misunderstandings appear, the right things are happening. Conflict surfaces in your brain, which is step 1 of learning. Step 2 is resolving that conflict. Today, then, I want to start by revisiting some ideas of how memory and pointers work in C […]