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 meetings of my Introduction to Robotics classes for the sixth week of the third term, we had the submission of their first projects.

Following the trend from the previous meetings, I let the students grade themselves – not their own group members this time, but the other groups’ presentations.

I had whiteboard markers with numbers at the bottom that I had a representative from each group draw from, to determine the order that they were going to present.

The Car Viper robot, unfortunately was not able to demonstrate, because their program wasn’t working and they couldn’t edit it on the other computers. I had to give them the benefit of the doubt because one of their members infected the computer they were using with a virus.

The Security Vault robot had a “PIN” entry unit that was like a game console controller, and it was shown how superfluous the wheels and initial forward motion was, making it look more like a garbage truck.

The Artist Robot was the best presented so far, even though they only used one sensor – touch – to determine what will be drawn, writing the initials of the school legibly, besides a circle and a “square” with rounded corners. After all they also had an error handler sound.

The Candy Sorter was limited to only two colors – extremely dark and light ones at that, not the three that they promised, and the members themselves showed surprise when it worked.

The Delivery Robot worked well the first two rounds, although they had to move the field near the window instead of the further corner of the room for their light sensor to work. By the start of the third round, it was off the expected track already.

The Robotic Arm was the second biggest disappointment in that it only picked up one color and ignored the rest, again not like the three colors we agreed upon. So it ended up just being a straight copy of what was in the pro challenges portion of the training software.

Session 993 also disappointed. Class dismissed.