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 my most recent Energy Conversion class, as promised in their last meeting we talked all about graphs, particularly pulse wave and square wave graphs and who resistor and capacitor circuits respond to them (or change them).

In the first part of the class it was all equations and how to set up measurements.

Afterwards, we moved to the lab where they were divided into their lab subject groups (including the computer engineering students, who don’t have the lab subject, but were opportunely distributed one per existing group).

There I gave them two spreadsheet files with graphs already set up, for which they had to change the values of the voltage, resistance, inductance and capacitance to be able to make the graph look like the same as what we discussed in class.

Since they had more than half an hour for this, all they had to do was plug in several different and wide-ranging numerical values to see how the graph would automatically change.

For the second file, it was the other way around: I gave parameters for the numeric inputs (resistance, capacitance and the period of the square wave) and they had to sketch the graphs for the voltage and current of the capacitor that was displayed.

The RC circuit, after all, relies on a quantity five times the product of the resistance and the capacitance as its minimum charging time. If the period of the square wave is greater than or less than this value then how would the curve of charging and discharging change in appearance relative to each other? They also had to see the consequence of this change in period and frequency to the maximum voltage of the square wave.

Just this morning, while I gave my Assembly Language class their latest exercise, which is on how to display the decimal value of a minor division operation, I was told that there are visitors from a nearby high school who are touring the campus.

Could they pass by my room to see the robots? I could have shown them several more interesting designs, such as the robotic arm or the line follower, but unfortunately, as usual, my class is in the middle of one of their projects, so all the kits were being used and could not be disassembled.

The school really does need one or two kits for exclusive use of the marketing.

Session 1709 wants a school to play in. Class dismissed.