IEE or IEEE

Hehe. I thought that doing more assembly than the previous curriculum had in it was important and I added more emphasis on doing assembly labs. In a later year, I also added some practical emphasis on floating point details, as well. I sure "heard" about it from many students. It was as though I was a bad teacher telling them about things they "would never use." :)

They didn't have to (the forms were 'check-off' types of things) and I didn't get to read the details (if any were added) as these forms were sent to management through a different channel. I would hear about the results more abstractly in a 1:1 meeting with the department chair.

Basically, the question in part turned on what you decide are the real teaching priorities. This class was a 200 level 'computer architecture' course (2nd year) and the usual background from the prior year was some glancing familiarity with C or C++, with a few small projects done, and some general classes on "what's a computer?" I felt that good programmers need some serious hands-on with assembly programming to deepen the abstract theory I also taught.

Now that I'm thinking of this, I also took some flak for another choice I felt was important for a 300 level course on operating systems and concurrent programming. Part of this course was just understanding the obvious terms and concepts, such as deadlock and methods to mitigate it, etc. But I also felt that part of understanding operating systems involved details of what program model these operating systems expect to manage -- code sections, constant data sections, initialized data sections, uninitialized data sections, heap and stack, etc., and how these are arranged and organized for reasonable management of an operating system and how these can be seen in light of threads, processes, tasks, and so on. And I expected them to be able to hand compile a simple C function, in 10-15 minutes when asked, because it's also important to understand how compilers work towards these program models, as well. What's a function prologue or an epilogue? How are local instances efficiently managed? What's a stack frame or activation record and why? What's a thunk or coroutine?

Similarly to using assembly to help deepen an understanding of theory, though lab and practical experience, so it is also that knowing the specific details of stacks and activation records and memory classifications and how they are used in operating systems helps to deepen the general operating system theory. Being exposed to exact details is important. I thought that learning some concrete examples were also important and that they should be able to go from concept to concrete implementation and from concrete example to general theory, back and forth freely. That the mental concepts and the practical details would be fluently understood.

Some felt this was too much to ask. Learning the terms and being able to provide dictionary definitions and, just maybe, being able to program a simulation (as a semi-final for the course) to show a 'deadlock' or a simple scheduling algorithm choice (which only takes a few hours to do) is enough, they believed.

Oh, well. Not in my course.

Jon

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Jonathan Kirwan
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Oh, yes. At my university where I was teaching we had CS, CE, and EE programs. No idea about UK, though. But in the US I think it's getting common.

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

Yes, there are still a few others besides Maplins but they are getting fewer in number. L.F. Hanney in Bath was still there last I was round that way. I suspect that you could find a number on the Tottenham Court Road (in London) if you looked hard enough. I think I also spotted one independent electronics store in Leeds (hard to tell at any great distance though).

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Paul E. Bennett ....................
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Paul E. Bennett

It's not TV these days (that was the 70's and 80's), it's computer games. That, and the fact that the devices we used to disassemble and fix (toasters, bikes, valve TVs, etc) have been replaced by items that either can't be disassembled or can't be fixed because they are intrinsically crappy. Until a kid has a "win" with fixing something, they assume that it's beyond them to conceive and build anything new.

But the actual means by which TV and games kill innovation is that they kill the imagination and the memory, not mainly time. If a kid is cramming unnecessary visual memories night and day, that's incredibly burdensome on the memory - which leaves too little brain power to save simple technical facts, make observations, and to imagine what might be. So those faculties all suffer. The best thing that ever happened during my childhood was that our TV blew up when I was 8, and my parents refused to replace it until I was 16.

Clifford Heath.

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Clifford Heath

Ian Bell wrote in news:ckjt4h$43q$ snipped-for-privacy@slavica.ukpost.com:

Was no such degree at the school I went to when I did.

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Richard
Reply to
Richard

There have been accredited CprE programs in the US for about 25 years now. I got My BS in CprE in '83, and there were several classes before mine. Like somebody else said, it was basically a specialization in the EE program. We only had to take one semester of fields instead of two, we only had to take one "power" class and we didn't have to do the motor-generator lab. I think there were a couple analog/RF classes we didn't have to take. Oh, and our first year we learned Pascal instead of Fortran.

We did have to take more CS (compiler design, language theory, data structures, Operating systems), and digitally-oriented EE classes (computer architecture, microprocessor interfacing, etc.).

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Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  My life is a patio
                                  at               of fun!
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Grant Edwards

When I went to college I took Mathematics and Physics. Computers did not exist (well, one or two built around Williams tubes). I became an electronics engineer by osmosis. This led to digital circuitry, nucleonics, and adaptation to transistors when they became available. This in turn led to software in various flavors, from applications to what would now be known as OS's and System Software. Almost everything later than a beam tetrode is self-taught in the school of hard knocks - i.e. does it bloody well work. The point being that the fundamentals I learnt in school have applied ever since, and still do. The words of masters such as Djikstra, Wirth, Ritchie, Kernighan, Hoare, Knuth (just to snatch a few names from the void) have been influential.

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Chuck F (cbfalconer@yahoo.com) (cbfalconer@worldnet.att.net)
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CBFalconer

Starting with his/hers toys at about age 8.

Reply to
Jim Stewart

The family's electric clock in my case. It wasn't broken before, but it never recovered.

Paul Burke

Reply to
Paul Burke

I'm glad I was not the only one who did the same thing. Took years for me to not her about that 'fix' again and again from the family though.

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Paul Carpenter          | paul@pcserviceselectronics.co.uk
    PC Services
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Paul Carpenter

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