teaching machines

CS 491 Meeting 9

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 Lecture 25 – Arrays

Dear students, Today we begin our descent into the world of collections of data. No longer will we be content with one or two numbers—we want them by the hundreds! For our first problem involving a data collection, we’ll look at testing whether or not a six-sided die (d6) is fair. We could do it […]

CS 352 Lecture 25 – Branching

Dear students, We ended our discussion of ARM assembly last time wanting to tell the user if they answered a math problem correctly or incorrectly. To support this, we needed to branch between two different sequences of code. We’ve seen unconditional branches that jump our program counter to some other labeled section, but what we […]

CS 145 Lecture 24 – Animation

Dear students, Let’s start with a Program This! Write a method times with the following behavior: times(‘!’, 3) yields “!!!” times(‘#’, 6) yields “######” times(‘-‘, 13) yields “————-” We’ll use this method to generate a random spelunking workout. After that, we’ll generate a few more images. This time we won’t use loops to march through […]

CS 352 Lecture 24 – Memory and Branching

Dear students, Sometimes in the middle of a semester, we forget why we are here. Let’s step back a moment and check out what the ACM/IEEE Computer Science 2013 Curriculum has to say about computer architecture. Are we hitting upon any of the expected ideas? Let’s then write some programs that will grow our understanding […]

CS 145 Lecture 23 – Images Cont’d

Dear students, I believe the ideas of computer science are best illustrated by manipulating digital media. To me, digital media presents a perfect context: it is one you are familiar with, and it is one that has real-world relevance. I’m sorry if you were hoping to work more with text and numbers. For those of […]

CS 352 Lecture 23 – Hello ARM, For Real

Dear students, Let’s have a look at some ARM instructions. We’ll start with the simplest ones: add a, b, c // a = b + c sub a, b, c // a = b – c Identifiers a, b, and c are just placeholders, not legal operands. In their place, we can either have registers […]

CS 145 Lab 8 – Spinner

Welcome to lab 8! If you have checkpoints from the last lab 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 […]

CS 491 Meeting 8

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 […]