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 second meetings of my Introduction to Robotics classes for the ninth week of the third term, the groups put the finishing touches on their maze traversing robots, since it was the meeting before the competition proper. It became evident that for some of the groups they were just coasting since they believed that there were no more improvements they can make with their robot.

There was also one group whose testing in the maze was the first time that I’ve seen in the nearly one month that they have been working on the project. Unfortunately, I already had a suspicion this group would be falling behind with respect to the other groups because they seemed to have a lot of underachieving members (at least in terms of the other classes they have been my students in – Mathematical Methods One and Graphing Two: Manual Drafting) compared to the other teams.

Another group also have been submitting progress reports just writing “We are almost finished.” I asked for specific details naturally, and they were hard pressed to come up with descriptive statements listing what they have done.

Yet another group joked around having a string attached to their robot that they said they were going to pull around while in the maze.

What I liked about some of the groups was that since I already gave them the next two tasks they are supposed to perform, there were already some members in a few of the groups who were already testing out ideas for the stair climbing robot, trying out if they could use the acrobat robot and its somersaulting chassis on two sets of large wheels.

I’m already thinking about letting them watch the videos of the previous school year’s boxing robots so they could have more of a head start on the last task. That means I have to borrow one of the LCD projectors, probably showing it on one of the walls while they are working on their second project.

Maybe this is what I need to make the students believe the stakes are higher in the last two projects and not as unrewarding as the maze in terms of time spent working on it compared to the possible pay off.

Session 1035 has been “almost finished” for two weeks now. Class dismissed.