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.

In the first meeting of my Introduction to Robotics classes for the third week of the third trimester, as I promised them, we had a quiz about the basic training they received from the software about how to use the robot construction kits.

This really was just to see if they were really paying attention to the instructions or just hanging around slacking off during our meetings, so there were very simple questions about the labels on the buttons of the robot’s brain box, and the pads for connecting the motors and the sensors.

The first three were 1, 2 and 3, while the last three were A, B and C. It was interesting to note that some students who weren’t sure wrote either the first three or the last three for both sets, because at least then they were sure they got three items right, while if they wrote both the numbers and the letters, there was as much chance they could get all right as all wrong. And they have not yet taken any statistics subject at that.

The rest of the questions were about the features of the programming interface of the software, with which they should have been very familiar already for the past two weeks, such as the items on the submenu, the commands in the various preset blocks.

A lot of these were intuitive, such as the Edit Menu having items such as copy, Variables having commands to set a value, add and subtract, options for Power including On and Off and so on.

On the back of the paper they were supposed to write the task descriptions for five of the challenges they were given during their training, and it was from there that I could give a flat ten points to people who really were absorbing what their robots were doing during that stage.

For the first class, there were people, who could not get one set of eight items in the programming interface, so I had to describe them as being the green blocks. Thus a student enterprisingly asked if they could get bonuses for giving the colors of the other blocks and buttons they were supposed to list, to which I agreed.

I also reminded them that their proposals for the first project are due on the next meeting. Otherwise, I have some pre-selected tasks they could choose from.

Session 955 forgot the colors. Class dismissed.