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

For my Graphics One exam last Wednesday I had three procedures, which had to divide between two classes (one from 8-10am, the other from 1015am to 1215pm).

I decided to give the first class the two exercises to the first class, in two sets for alternating seats. This turned out to be convenient because there were twenty-two students, who took the test. It would not have fit in the room to tell them to sit one terminal apart, like I did in the second class, where only seventeen students attended (in the thirty six capacity lab).

The challenge for me was that it was difficult to implement the “no talking” rule at first because a lot of people were late and I didn’t write the instructions down on the board but had to repeat them every time someone walked in (and, later on, it was their classmates who told them what they were supposed to do).

The problems I gave them were similar to some of their exercises, where only the final diagram is shown, and minimal instructions. In fact, in one of the two (and in the third one) only a sketch of a hand-drawn illustration is reproduced, to simulate how they might be handed their clients’ specifications just in case they want to take up engineering design as a profession.

One was a circuit of a heat exchanger (with several similar-looking components they could have just copied and pasted once they drew the first one), while the other was a top view of a “machine part” with semi-circle and diagonal edges that they had to scale to dimensions. So they were good checkpoints for what they have learned before.

About fifteen minutes after most of them got in, that was when they settled down and there was hardly any talking. The only discussions were to copy the files of the exam from their classmates, since, despite writing it on the board, there were still those who didn’t restart their computer after copying the file from terminal one through the network. It had a limit of 10 users connected at a time, so if some don’t log out, the others can’t access the same file.

The task for the second class was an empty room template (again, to scale) for which they had to lay out at least eighteen cubicles. This one was at least one megabyte in its compressed for (compared to 118KB for the larger of the two first ones).

This was because there were very detailed instructions (as well as hints for what features of the design software to use) to what they should do, taking up three pages.

At the start I had to tell the students to check the size of their cubicles, because it was too small that four could already fit in one column set in the middle of the design floor. I had to specify for them how to change the units in the setting of their plate from feet to meters (which was what the original sketch used).

Later I only had to tell one student that placing the L-shaped cubicles in a closed configuration gave their users no access. At least a minimum aisle width was already mentioned. And a couple more students had to be told that they were making the space too tight putting a cubicle chair against the wall or back to back.

I’ll post about the last two exams tomorrow. That’s it for now.