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

I will now resume my account of my first mechanics lecture session for the seventh week of classes.

In my second example for the two-dimensional forces, I gave two of the three forces acting on the object and its final acceleration. I used squirrels on a frictionless lake pushing on a cookie jar stolen from campers to demonstrate the senselessness of all the forces acting on the object at once – and darn if I didn’t have to explain that bit to the class as well because someone asked.

The final example was supposed to be simpler but a bit more tedious, where they had to get the summation of five forces on an object (four of them along the axis) and from that obtain the components and the resultant and direction of the acceleration.

That was with fifty minutes left in the period. I then decided to make it into their exercise instead, and – not surprisingly – there were students who took up the whole time in solving the problem.

Some under-performing students* were enthusiastic about having just this topic in the quiz, so I guess they found the topic easy to comprehend.

My calendar now indicates that the next event to be related is the Open Campus that occurred the following day.

Registration started at 10am. At least that was an improvement from the year before, although there were fewer participants because there were no extensive letter invitations to applicants this time around.

I prepared parts of my presentation for the orientation, where I was going to be talking about the various activities we have for the college students. I just got a calendar of activities until the end of the term, a list of proposed short term and long-term NSTP projects in social action to the various neighboring rural communities and environmental (including the butterfly garden and the hydroponics area) and the list of established student organizations.

I just added my own highlights on the sports fest, the bonfire last January (hinted to be repeated), and the Innovation Week, to be held every term now. I also revealed the plans on the tie-ups with the companies in the nearby industrial park for the Career and Placement Office.

After lunch was the Robotics Exhibit, where we demonstrated double the number of robots from last year, adding a six-legged robot, an wheeled robot drawing on a piece of paper while holding, raising and dragging a pen, and a robotic grasping and lifting arm. For the old exhibits: the new maze our “bump and turn left” robot took up the whole five by five foot soccer field; the line (masking tape over the dark floor) follower robot had the three by three foot field to himself; and the wall follower robot was given one alcove all to himself.

Our next projects to be assigned include the stair climbing robot and the tag-playing robot.

I’ll have to cut this short again at this point. Duty calls. Class dismissed.

*Calling them under-performing or under-achieving students seems to be the politically correct term, but it still connotes a certain expectation of their actions.