RISC-V processors, like ARM processors, are complex beasts, making them challenging to teach with. When teaching with them it's important to have appropriate development tools to reflect the immediate pedagogical goals but also to provide students with a pathway for further learning and application. When I teach courses on computer architecture, like EECS 2021 at […]
The Spike simulator is a command-line application for RISC-V development. It allows for both 32-bit and 64-bit simulations and supports multiple variants of RISC-V types. It's an alternative to using the Segger emSim simulator, which has both a graphical mode and a command line mode and. It's also more up-to-date and widely-used than the RVS […]
I've been itching to kick the tires on the CLion IDE to see how it works as a contemporary C and C++ development environment. I've been using Jetbrain's IntelliJ IDE ever since my student,Richard Robinson, recommended it to me for Java development. I typically write C programs using embedded IDEs like MCUXpresso, Segger Embedded Studio […]
As part of a research project I'm resurrecting some KL25Z boards and ChipKit basic I/O shield boards and seeing if they can be used together. The ChipKit has some pushbuttons and LEDs. The following code, with the help of single-stepping and the debugger can get the LED bank and BTN1 on the ChipKit I/O board […]
While chatbots like ChatGPT are truly ground-breaking, they have limitations. In fact, there are many cases in which chatbots simply cannot return an answer due to the limitations of the LLM structure and dataset. Experts quickly find the limitations of chatbots, but novices to a topic are very likely to get tripped up by the […]
I'm working on question sets for introductory programming classes in languages like Java, C and Matlab, with a possibility of extending into other commonly-used languages (in our department) like Python and Verilog. The idea is that these questions could be deployed into a protected lab test or an open in-class "flipped homework" environment. Key to […]
This is the fifth in the series of postings on automated grading in C. Here, I've modified the VPL exercise to include four possible flowcharts that the students can implement, but the particular flowchart now get assigned to the student based on the time of day. The VPL output (both "run" and "evaluate" looks like […]
In this fourth post, I'm going to modify the way the unit tests in C get picked up by the VPL "run" and "evaluate" scripts so that rather than look for a particular phrase returned by the unit test (something like "The unit test expected to see 5 but the student's function returned 1"), it's […]
This is the third post in the series on evaluating student assignments in VPL with C and unit testing. We're targeting using VPL on Moodle / eClass. Specifically, the bash scripts are based on the fantastic work of Smith College professor emeritus, Dr. Dominique Thiébaut. He wrote about his VPL work here and while his […]
Here's a simple VPL exercise that can grade a simple student-submitted function. The idea is that there are two bash scripts, one for rough work and one for graded evaluation and these scripts will compile the C program, consisting of a main function that calls the student function, passing two integers to it and having […]