CS Fundamentals: Guided Lab

Time: 60-90 minutes. Represent 0,1,127,128,255 as eight-bit unsigned values and reinterpret the same patterns as signed values. Encode Aé, print its bytes, and confirm decoding round-trips.

Truncate the final encoded character and observe your decoder's configured error behavior.

Acceptance: preserve exact bytes, distinguish units, and explain why malformed bytes must not silently become a claimed successful round trip.

Review and remediation

Submit the starting failure, intermediate trace, final result, and one limitation. Explain the result without running the implementation. If the acceptance check fails, return to the matching worked example, correct the model, then use a fresh input before resubmitting. Record any AI assistance and which claims you independently checked.