Instructor's Notes
Purpose
We have created this assignment to be one of the problems dealing with coding
and reliability. We have probably already done an assignment on Hamming Codes or a Polynomial Code but students will
relate much better to the Credit Card lab assignment. Unlike the previously
mentioned situations this lab requires the students to work in BCD and to be
comfortable in converting from BCD to binary and back. I have not asked the
students to do the whole 16-character code as it is very time consuming (I know, as
I have done it when I had some spare time) and though sometimes there are a
multitude of similar parts in a circuit, it would appear to be busy work in this
case. However all of the essential parts of the problem are there. The BCD adder
and the latter section of creating the modulo-10 subtraction may have been done
already in previous assignments.
Environment
The target audience for this assignment is the Sophomore class in the
CSE Department at the University of
Connecticut which comprises mostly students of the CS&E and E&SE Departments. The Web window
environment, in which this assignment is set, is multi-framed which we have
constructed to provide an appropriate setting for this learning session. The top
frame recognizes the place of origin of the work, the left-hand frame provides a
standard index of assignment components, and the lower frame contains a
context-sensitive help button as well as communication links to the instructor
and Teaching Assistants. We have more recently created the ability to hide the
top and bottom frames to provide more screen space for the content in which the
instructional material appears.
We use the logic design package called LogicWorks (from Capilano Computing -
though available through the publisher Adison Wesley) for the simulation. It allows the use of gate
and/or chip-level circuits to be drawn. The user can also create devices that
are specific to the application using the Device Editor. This particular
assignment requires that use.
For each assignment we try to provide feedback to the student and also attempt
to include a number of questions structured using Bloom's Taxonomy of
Educational Objectives. In doing this we hope to be able to give an assessment
of the student based on his or her responses (assuming that they are honest
answers - and in my experience they usually are!) that represents a profile
relative to Bloom's levels. We also ask the student questions that help us in
evaluating the material of this assignment to complete the loop in the overall
educational process.
Copyright Information
Finally we ask a couple of things if you use this assignment with your class.
Please let us know that you are doing so by e-mailing me at keith@cse.uconn.edu and, should you print
any of our material,
please include
© UConn CSE
on the sheets. If you have any comments we are always pleased to hear from you.
Thanks.
Keith Barker
and the
Web-Based Learning Team.