Re: Newbie in distress :-)

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article
<Pine.A41.3.96-heb-2.07.991023170713.120704A-100000@pluto.mscc.h
uji.ac.il>,
  Ehud Lamm <mslamm@mscc.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> The topic is of course also included in the text book.

I fear students are unlearning the technique of reading
books, in favor of throwing a quick question to some newsgroup
in the hopes of finding an answer.

The problem of course is that this does not scale well. It is
not nearly so productive to send a message to the newsgroup
that says:

"I have to write some Ada code for designing nuclear fusion
reactors, and I am pretty much a newbie when it comes to nuclear
fusion. I wondered if anyone could give me some quick pointers,
or some code that I could adapt. Thanks a million."

:-)

One of the things we need to teach our students is how to read
(and learn from the reading of) reference materials of various
levels of sophistication.

My final exam in my yearly honors assembly language and
processor architecture course tries to
get at this issue. These are second year students, and the exam
is open book two hours.

I give them a reference manual for a completely new machine that
I designed, a small machine, but not necessarily a simple one
(last year, the machine was a small EPIC machine). They have
to read the reference manual, which gives the instruction set
and the ABI for the machine, and then write some simple programs
and answer questions about programs for the machine, and answer
some general questions about the strong and weak points of the
particular architecture.

I tell them, spend the first half hour reading, don't put pen
to paper till 30 minutes is up :-)


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