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 meetings of my Introduction to Robotics classes for the eleventh week of the third term, which was also the start of the second week of their stair ascending and descending task, the students still continued working on their robots.

Some were, in fact, so despondent that they kept asking me if there had been any robot made before that could climb up the stairs, because they somehow believed based on their one week’s experience that it was not possible.

This was the time that I went on the internet not just to show them more pictures of robot designs that could go up stairs, (not just the first page of the net search that I printed out before) but also one short film showing one machine with tank-like treads going up several steps at a time.

Despite that additional information though, which I was expecting them to look up for themselves, no one that I saw followed that design.

Maybe they were lacking in parts, but they weren’t complaining about that outside of the fact that some of the groups had taken from the other kits.

At this point I realized that next time, the task would really have to include the “egg delivery” for them to make good use of the sensors and programming of the robot.

In the first meeting of my Computer Systems Organization lecture class for that same week, I talked first about the clear input that is present in some pre-constructed flip flop chips that they could buy for their experiments.

Then I talked about how gates and flip-flops can be integrated into one circuit, how the truth table that it generated is now called the state table because of the several outputs it uses, and from there, making the state diagram, which these computer science students are already familiar with from their theory of computation classes a few terms before.

Lastly I showed them that having a D flip-flop master-slave has the same output as only one D flip-flop, while it is changed for a T flip-flip master slave, which were the answers to their assignment.

Session 1051 used no sensors. Class dismissed.