The individual me

after two weeks of the pilot-copilot scheme, my students seem to have gotten a little better (no more late submissions). it was time for an individual exam (part of the schedule too).

i've had the problem of worrying that my afternoon students would just simply look at the submissions of the morning class so i decided to give different machine exercises for the first class.

ME 10-11 morning

create a class ATM that has the following methods

• void deposit(int money) - deposits money into your ATM account
  
• void withdraw(int money) - withdraws money from your ATM account. Money must not be greater than 10000, in the hundreds, and you cannot withdraw more than what you have in your account, including the 10 php service charge.
  
• int checkBalance() - returns balance. this however costs 1 php
  

ME 10-11 afternoon

create a class Cellphone that has the following methods

• void load(int money) - load Cellphone with money
  
• void text() - text message, costs 1 php
  
• void call(int minutes) - calls another phone. this method attempts to call for as long as it can, subtracting 8 php per minute until call is completed, or no more credit is available. in that case, this method outputs an error message showing how many minutes were actually used.
  
• int checkBalance() - returns how much credit the phone has. costs 1php.
  
• void transferLoad(Cellphone c, int money) - transfers money from this cellphone to c. 1 php service charge. errors on lack of money.
  

The individual ME is recorded as double the regular ME score. So that at least this single individual ME could have bigger weight than the group ME's.

Anyway, the results. The morning class performed well, everyone got this ME, and quite a few finished the bonus problem i gave them. Afternoon class was appalling. Only four people managed to finish the exercise. Despite my initial misgivings, i asked them to finish the problem over the break so that they'd get to see how classes are created.

The next meeting (back to the regular P-C scheme, different pairs) i switched the exercises and the morning class did the Cellphone exercise as easy as pie. The afternoon class finished the late Cellphone and the ATM exercise (but then again, they had help).

I cant move on with the lesson (Stacks and Queues next) until im sure that both classes have a good grasp on object creation.