Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Segueing to English from its mention in the last entry, we were also informed by the Commission on Higher Education that Filipino subjects should have been offered at the same time as English for the first year college students, with the same content, just in another language. This means that those freshman classes that did not take up Filipino this school year will have to take them next year, along with the incoming freshmen, who will have both English and Filipino subjects simultaneously.

Last Saturday I met with the Computer Science students doing their thesis on astronomy software. Actually just one of them, because we met at around 8pm and by that time the student who was the younger sister of my batch mate from college already had to go home.

The student told me first of all that they could not make the PDA software that is supposed to be part of their software real time adjusted. Even though I don’t know whether their panel will accept it as world-class or not, I did give them an alternative, which was to make it user adjustable depending on the stars they could see in certain directions.

The view could be adjusted by whole hour and it will still more or less show the part of the sky that is visible. Of course, it assumes that the user is more or less familiar with the bright stars and the orientations, so it is definitely not for first time stargazers.

They also took my survey of 48 questions and concentrated on the questions that were common misconceptions that accounted for half of the statements. They encoded the date of 315 respondents to whom I have given the survey, which were from students in astronomy for last two years.

I gave them a website that emphasizes the incorrect astronomy shown in a lot of mainstream movies, and although they didn’t was to cite it, I had to tell them to keep it in their paper because it shows that the statements used in the survey are not just assumptions, and that misconceptions in astronomy are common enough to warrant a website trying to correct that mistake.

In fact the student herself was incredulous that the Big Dipper is not a constellation and that toilet bowls do not drain in different direction in the Northern and Southern hemisphere. I suggested she also state other websites that discredit these myths, since they are easy enough to find.

They had also changed their Ishikawa diagram, although the long half-page paragraph rationale for the diagram seemed to be a very forced effort and could be reworded.

She showed me the beginnings of their software, which, after it shows the stars of a certain constellation, has a voice-over giving the description of certain stars when they are clicked. So far though they have only had one constellation, displayed, Leo, but they’re already working on the appearance and recordings for other constellations.

Lastly the student asked me to answer the three sample exams that I gave them. And here I was thinking they would be able to answer them by themselves from all of the material I have given them, and that I thought they themselves have already researched.