PJM Absence

PJM Absence

by Philip Morgan -
Number of replies: 3

By now, you may heave heard that I am the latest Coronavirus casualty. I'm still alive, but need to self-isolate for underlying medical reasons!

Although your priority will be the mad panic to finish the NEA, mine is floating point binary. This is a really important topic that has come up on EVERY paper 2 exam, so you can't afford to ignore it. It is also quite difficult, but hopefully we have made a decent start last week. All resources can be found through this forum post for the next 2 weeks. After that you should be doing mocks - the arrangements for those will depend on whether schools and colleges are still open by then.

Firstly, I have attached the full source code for my floating point converter program. You should NOT use this to cheat with the work - I expect to see working.

The first task is a the simple Zig Zag Floating Point Sheet. We have already done enough of this for you to all have a go, although some of the answers to the second part are tricky if you try to put them into normal form. Will post some general feedback for this later! I will give you until after the weekend to complete this, but it should only take the first lesson this week!

You then need to continue to work through the Real Numbers PowerPoint, which covers normalisation and issues to do with computational errors. After that, do the Floating Point Exam Questions, which are due for the following Monday.

Any questions, don't hesitate to post to a reply to this.

In reply to Philip Morgan

Re: PJM Absence

by Philip Morgan -

I have just checked the first simple floating point exercise, which is due by this evening. To date, 3  people have submitted it. May I remind you that remote working does not mean not working!!! As already stated, this is an important topic which typically accounts for about 10% of paper 2. Therefore, mastery in this area it will be a important factor when we come to propose a grade for you to AQA.

In reply to Philip Morgan

Re: PJM Absence

by Philip Morgan -

The Zig Zag floating point sheet activity has now closed. If you have not uploaded this (the usual suspects), then shame on you! I have attached the answers here. For once they are all correct, and the answers to question 2 are all normalised, even if some of the bit patterns in question 1 are not! Of particular interest is 2f, which needs a negative exponent to normalise the mantissa.

In reply to Philip Morgan

Re: PJM Absence

by JACK MAYNARD -

Sorry Phil, I have been focusing on my last parts of my NEA since the lockdown as it has been the optimal time to do it. (except of course for the beta testing). I have handed that in now, so I will get to work on the backlog post haste!