It's Not About The Car

Fast Car isn't about the car. James Andrew Smith is a Professional Engineer and Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of York University's Lassonde School, with degrees in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering from the University of Alberta and McGill University.  Previously a program director in biomedical engineering, his research background spans robotics, locomotion, human birth and engineering education. […]

ChatGPT: "I'm sorry but I couldn't find any information"

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 […]

Wearing a Mask in Class + Zoom Captions

I've been teaching large lectures for many years. After the initial remote teaching phase of the pandemic management required most faculty to go back to in-person teaching. While most of my colleagues decided to do so maskless, I made the unpopular decision to wear N95+ respirators while teaching in class. Despite pushback on N95s from […]

The Workplace Incident Report (WIR)

Update! (Nov 30, 2023) It appears that the Workplace Incident Report (WIR) form is back to being hidden behind the PPY authentication wall. These are not state secrets. It is a document related to health and safety and workers have the right to access them without having to jump through authentication hoops that hinder workers […]

Unit Testing a Question Bank

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 […]

Automated Student Evaluations in C (part 5)

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 […]

Automated Student Evaluations in C (part 4)

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 […]

Automated Student Evaluations in C (part 3)

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 […]

Automated Student Evaluations in C (part 2)

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 […]

Automated student testing in Java (Part 1)

As with earlier posts for Matlab, I'm putting together a set of exercises for automated student testing in introductory programming classes, but this time for Java. The idea is to integrate this into Virtual Programming Lab or secure lab tests. In a future post I'll do a VPL version of this, but for now this […]