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.

The first meeting of my Introduction to Robotics classes for the eighth week of the third term was when the students were in for another surprise.

The deadline for their maze-traversing robot was moved once again to the week afterwards, giving them two more meetings, or at least four days.

But to give them more time to prepare for the next tow projects after the current one, I already gave them the schedule of deadlines until the end of the term, just to show them that there will be no more extensions in the succeeding projects.

The group that used the “shopping cart” back wheels before, replaced it with a “peg leg” stump that made a dragging sound the whole time that it was going through the maze.

They were still not achieving the results they wanted though, so they decided to make the stump the front part of the vehicle, and the maneuvering wheels were placed in the back. With this they got better performance and control in their robot.

There were other groups who were problematic that even though they attached a light sensor in front of their robot, it still could not recognize the black paper that was attached to the dead end walls of the maze, so the condition that they built into the robot that it should back up when it comes to a black surface didn’t work.

For some it was just a matter of getting the correct numeric value in the program that the light sensor attaches to when it sees the color black, particularly the exact non-reflective shade of the type of paper used for the dead end indicator.

For the others, it was just the placement in the program of the condition for activating the light sensor before (instead of after) checking if the touch sensors were pressed.

At least one group while I was roving decided to forego the light sensor altogether and just rely on leaning towards one direction more than the other in their program, based on their analysis that in terms of frequency or probability, the robot had a better chance if it always moved left after facing a wall head on rather than going to the right.

Session 1017 can’t see black. Class dismissed.