Me and my wife are involved with the Michigan Tech summer youth programs and are familiar with the CS offerings. If anybody has any questions about it, feel free to reply! It is not unusual for international students to participate in the program. http://youthprograms.mtu.edu/

We do the inverse as far as capitals, but we also use the "static" modifier to make sure nobody tries to call the function from another file.

If you read the article, you would see that the way that the information is encoded into the VIN doesn't allow them to reach the optimal number of combinations without bending the rules they created when VINs were established.