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 tenth week of the third term, they started on their second project: the stair ascending and descending robot.

For this one we are using a five step wooden construction that was already here when I started teaching, like an extended Olympic tiered platform. The entire surface is painted white, but there are edges lined in black for those who want to use light sensors to be able to tell their robot when to “step up” and when to “step down”.
Each step is approximately three and a half centimeters higher or lower than the next one.

It is now located on top of the five feet by five feet robot soccer field that used to house the Styrofoam maze. “Used to” because the culminating activity of the maze traversal contest we had was that the students now got a chance to destroy the maze that had given them so much trouble.

What I didn’t expect was that the group mates of DEIV from when they constructed the maze last year in their own Introduction to Robotics class felt sad that we had wrecked what they had worked so hard to construct, even with DEIV “supervising”.

Unfortunately, it was already showing the wear and tear of being one year old, with all of the masking tape already peeling off or having completely lost its adhesive and had to be patched up several times.

Besides, with the current students’ own complaints about how they could not get their robots to get out of dead ends, a new maze has to be constructed for the next batch or generation of students that takes that fact into consideration, maybe with wider corridors so that the robot can turn around if it reaches a dead end. In fact, it may not be made of Styrofoam anymore.

In fact, I’m already thinking of some variations of the current task for the next batch, such as giving their stair ascending and descending robot a load of an egg on its back to make sure they don’t just jump up and down with their robot in an attempt to be the first to cross. Another is splitting the robot groups into two teams, and having them use the fields for their initial intention, which in this case will be three against three robot soccer. But that’s for next year.

Session 1041 can’t stair-climb. Class dismissed.