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 […]
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 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 […]
August 2021 Background Here, we're going to apply ThrowTheSwitch's Unity unit test framework to C programs. The test framework is available on GitHub. Three files need to be downloaded from the GitHub. There are a few more files that need to be developed within VPL to make it work, and those are described below. We're […]
Sometimes you need to go beyond the default settings in VPL. That means creating a custom "run" and "evaluate" setup. Here, I'll simplify a great example by Dominique Tiebaut, Emeritus prof at Smith College, written for an assignment in C. (archive) We'll check a "hello world" example in C, but won't use the default evaluate.cases […]
To allow the UNO to be programmed by the PICKit 4 via the ICSP header (circled in blue, below), we need to cut the reset signal trace that links the '328P processor to the USB Bridging chip that is also found on the UNO, the MEGA16U2. There are also two other wires that we won't […]