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 meeting of my Intermediate Robotics Lecture and Lab classes for the third week of the second term, I had them continue with the first project and at the same time telling them to start the design plans on the second project, which is to make a robotic arm that draws five by five evenly spaced dots on a piece of paper, without using the Art Bot design that is already given in the robotics kit they're allowed.

I knew, since their design had to have a stationary base that they were going to either go for the arm with two pivot elbows design, or the old X-Y computer plotter design with a pen suspended by two axes along the paper.

I did not give them any limits as to the distances of the dots, only that they had to be evenly spaced, except they should not be closer than a centimeter to each other.

What I didn't tell them is – and that they won't know unless they somehow get access to this site - that this is going to be the basis of another project of theirs where they could be asked to write anything they want (or that the teacher wants) on the piece of paper, so there will be more mathematics involved than they have been exposed to so far.

I also asked them to finalize and have the posters approved for their first exhibit competition, which I had to move two days beyond the original schedule to drum up enough interest on our display from both the college and the Integrated school students and faculty.

Besides, if we held it originally on a Wednesday as first set, there would not be that many college students on campus to watch them or their robots “perform”.

The thing now is, that our set exam is already next week. Right now I have not really lectured to the class besides the serial port discussions that are just plain memorization. So I have very little idea yet as to what the exam coverage will be besides robot designs using the kits we have.

The good part about this kind of test is that it is the kind that a certain student is not going to be able to ask pertinent questions on while answering.

Session 1333 can't study creativity. Class dismissed.