Student's Notes
Purpose
We have created this assignment to be one of the problems dealing with coding
and reliability. You have probably already done an assignment on Hamming Codes or a Polynomial Codes but you will relate
much better to the Credit Card lab assignment. Unlike the previously mentioned
situations this lab requires you to work in BCD and to be comfortable in
converting from BCD to binary and back. I have not asked you 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. You may have already done the BCD
adder and the latter section of creating the modulo-10 subtraction 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 you 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 you an assessment based on
your responses (assuming that they are honest answers - and in my experience
they usually are!) that represents a profile relative to Bloomıs levels. We also
ask you questions that help us in evaluating the material of this assignment to
complete the loop in the overall educational process. It is important that you
respond to help us make the assignment and methodology better. If you have any
comments, or think there are other things that could usefully be commented upon
in these notes, we are always pleased to hear from you. Thanks.
Keith Barker, and the Web-based learning team