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Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

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Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#91

Post by rrrx3 »

roberte3 wrote: post #18
ChuckMcM wrote: post #12

Generally if you can pull that off you are way past the course material :-) I had a FORTRAN problem which asked to print the current bowling score given a series of numbers between 0 and 10 (number of pins knocked down) and I had it print out spares as '/' and strikes as 'X' and it didn't print the actual score until you didn't get a strike (as is the custom on bowling.) and the TA complained. (the assignment was to…

In college, I had to take a 1-credit hour lab course on MS-Office so that I could take an accounting class I wanted. The first lab featured a typing test app where you had to be able to type 40wpm or they made you drop the class. The app was a DOS app that a) made you type a certain bit of unchanging text every time for the test, and if you finished it type it again until you made a certain number of mistakes. I wrot…

...did you happen to go to NC State? Just wondering if you took the same class I was supposed to take (placed out after a night of cramming on excel, having never used it before)

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#92

Post by shiftpgdn »

jacalata wrote: post #76
MichaelGG wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird. When I interviewed at MS, education never came up at all. Just lots of algorithms questions, from ~9am to 7 in the evening. I was about 24 at the time. I wouldn't ditch GPA for no reason, but avoiding a bad professor and getting a good one seems far more valuable overall.

I'm assuming you sent in some kind of paperwork before walking up and interviewing - did that perhaps include a resume with a GPA on it?

Are you seriously putting your GPA on your resume?

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#93

Post by lmm »

mungoman2 wrote: post #84
MichaelGG wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, a compsci degree would have helped me in some cases. I ended up studying algorithms and such by myself anyways. OTOH, I've interviewed people with degrees in cs and they couldn't even explain binary search, let alone implement it. I dropped out cause my teachers were atrocious. My algebra teacher couldn't explain why absolute value was a function, just that it was and we must learn it, period. Another teacher sai…

Could you expand about absolute value? Is seems reasonable to me to think of it as a function.

Maybe pedagogy recapitulates history of mathematics. "What is a function?" is kind of a wrong question, because "function" is just a word (what is it you need a "function" for?), but in a lot of early mathematics the idea tended to describe a sort of physical intuition, that a function was something like the shape that something physical (like a string under tension) - remember that in the early days mathematics was more a branch of physics than a discipline in its own right. In nature things tend to change smoothly - what we now call "analytic functions" - and you wouldn't ever have a sharp inflection point like there is for absolute value at zero.

A more modern notion of a function only really came about after the discovery of the fourier transform, where it turns out that functions like absolute value (and sillier things like the dirac delta) have a fourier transform, and, worse, some perfectly ordinary functions like sin have fourier transforms that come out as these weird things. Eventually (and, I suspect, partially because the tools of fourier analysis were so useful) people started treating "something that can be fourier transformed" almost as the definition of a function.

(The present set-theoretic definition of a function is even more recent; I would assume it comes from Russell/Hilbert/etc.'s efforts to give mathematics a formal foundation by expressing everything in terms of set theory)

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#94

Post by MichaelGG »

jacalata wrote: post #76
MichaelGG wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird. When I interviewed at MS, education never came up at all. Just lots of algorithms questions, from ~9am to 7 in the evening. I was about 24 at the time. I wouldn't ditch GPA for no reason, but avoiding a bad professor and getting a good one seems far more valuable overall.

I'm assuming you sent in some kind of paperwork before walking up and interviewing - did that perhaps include a resume with a GPA on it?

No. I dropped out of school at 15.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#95

Post by jacalata »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #92
jacalata wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming you sent in some kind of paperwork before walking up and interviewing - did that perhaps include a resume with a GPA on it?

Are you seriously putting your GPA on your resume?

Personally no, but I did when graduating college. I mostly found it ridiculous to pretend that if something didn't come up in the interview, it didn't come up in the hiring process at all, as though Microsoft practices the kind of open audition that my local bar ran last week.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#96

Post by MichaelGG »

mungoman2 wrote: post #84
MichaelGG wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, a compsci degree would have helped me in some cases. I ended up studying algorithms and such by myself anyways. OTOH, I've interviewed people with degrees in cs and they couldn't even explain binary search, let alone implement it. I dropped out cause my teachers were atrocious. My algebra teacher couldn't explain why absolute value was a function, just that it was and we must learn it, period. Another teacher sai…

Could you expand about absolute value? Is seems reasonable to me to think of it as a function.

Well it was introduced as "absolute value uses lines on each side. It means you drop the negative if there is one". I asked what the point of it was, cause it sounded sorta useless. Instead of saying "OK, well, how would you express distance, x1-x2?", she was just stuck.

I suppose that's what happens when you have general teachers that don't really know maths or science, don't really feel that it's interesting and offers amazing ways to look at the world. In fact, I'd be surprised if she actually knew beyond what she was teaching. It's not like middle grade teachers have to take advanced courses, and they do have a wide workload.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#97

Post by Carrok »

cbhl wrote: post #29
derekp7 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar experience with a Visual Basic class at community college (required credit for the degree at the time). Since the class was kind of boring (was already a C programmer, Basic was way in my past at that point), I wanted to make the projects more interesting. So, on a calculator project, we were to make a hand-held calculator emulator. I asked if there were any restrictions on the type of calculator, and…

It baffles me that there are college-level CS instructors who haven't heard of RPN before -- my high school CS teacher had us write an RPN calculator. That said, I can see an argument that an RPN calculator "trivializes" the assignment compared to an infix calculator, especially if the latter was supposed to do order-of-operations.

I've been a senior developer for almost a decade now. I've never heard of RPN. Not everyone took the same classes you did, get off your high-horse.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#98

Post by gayprogrammer »

jacquesm wrote: post #44
derekp7 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the kicker -- order of operations wasn't a requirement (and probably wouldn't have been allowed) either. Maybe I should have put a mode button on it so that you can select the desired mode. But that experience did teach me a valuable lesson -- always follow the specifications as close as possible, don't try to innovate (unless working on your own projects). And, I've learned to spot (and explain) contradictory…

In a way it is a pity that that was your take home lesson. You deserved an A++ and the take home should have been that going the extra mile gets rewarded.

Yet, in CS courses it doesn't. An A+ means you passed all of the automated tests.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#99

Post by robertfw »

jzwinck wrote: post #55
ChuckMcM wrote: post #12

Generally if you can pull that off you are way past the course material :-) I had a FORTRAN problem which asked to print the current bowling score given a series of numbers between 0 and 10 (number of pins knocked down) and I had it print out spares as '/' and strikes as 'X' and it didn't print the actual score until you didn't get a strike (as is the custom on bowling.) and the TA complained. (the assignment was to…

I took an exam which presented a drawing of a logic chip and a description of its pins and asked us to implement some functionality using this chip plus the minimum number of external gates. I managed to implement it using only wires, with no extra gates at all. Apparently this surprised the instructors; the best known solution used two extra gates. They gave full marks to me, but also to the many students who used t…

> I found this distasteful: I had devoted extra time to finding the optimal solution, at the expense of spending more time on other parts of the exam

Sounds like a good lesson for someone graduating into the workforce ;)

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#100

Post by kileywm »

A general comment on how-to instructions:

I really respect and appreciate that this article addressed pitfalls where mistakes are common and disastrous. The step involving a router to clear a cavity: lots of mistakes were made, because it's hard to do that step. It takes courage to for an instructor to admit mistakes, and the pupil learns all the better from those admissions.

For all of the Instructable, Pinterest, and various other how-to articles on the internet, I believe we could all benefit from instructors being more forthcoming about pitfalls like the author(s) of this article.

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