Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

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

Day Two, Week Two, Term Two, School Year Two… Thousand and Five to Twenty Oh Six: met with my Interfacing Computer System students in the robotics lab, and after several minutes discussion, we came up with an new schedule, meeting twice a week – once for two hours and once for three hours. Either can be used for lecture or lab, because we are going to be meeting in the robotics lab anyway.

I started them on the difference between the parallel port and the serial port, which obviously makes the first one easier to make simple one-way data transmission circuits with, before we go to the complicated projects.

Then somewhere in the middle I ran out of material – intentionally, really - and it became a lab session, with the three groups (or pairs) making their basic twenty-five-pin parallel male port connected to the breadboard where they will be constructing their circuits.

It beats having to solder their sockets to the printed circuit boards (PCBs) and braid them just like they did in David’s Introduction to Robotics class two years ago, whose application they are only now beginning to fully comprehend.

We just want the eight light emitting diodes (LED, one for each bit port) to turn on or off depending on the keyboard or mouse numeric input.

The tasks were delegated, and while some cut the wires and soldered, others connected the diodes and the resistors to the breadboards and checked the working condition.

They didn’t finish though, so we’ll continue on our next lecture-lab session. I just hope the associate dean and the registrar’s office approve the paperwork.

After that I met with the lone student enrolled in the second section of the mechanics lab, and told him that he had no choice but to transfer to the other section and drop the conflicting subject.

When he approached me afterwards to say that he was allowed to drop but not to add a subject, I had to write a specific letter for him to give to the registrar’s personnel since he had to be part of the co-requisite lecture and lab subjects. After all, the subjects he dropped were all minors in the first place.

That means I have nine or ten students in both general science education subjects. Not going to be as difficult to give them tests as last time, with thirty plus students per class.

Session 767 showed no connection here. Class dismissed.