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.

Earlier today I had one of the recent engineering graduates handle the lecture for my intermediate Robotics class about their thesis.

This is because during their "defense" there was no technical information whatsoever that was presented, so rather than read all the same books and manuals that they did and either talk all about the theory (which may differ with the actual practice in the first place) or spend more time trying out the circuits and the hardware, I decided to just ask them to be my guest lecturers.

This, in fact, will also satisfy my disappointment over their previous presentation.

The discussion (which started late anyway) actually threatened to go into the same territory, first talking about why they chose the particular hardware for their robot brain box, besides the fact that it was what the book they used recommended.

Then he went into the disadvantages of the hardware, a lot of which seemed daunting, such as the chip crashing often and the very small memory allocation. But then he turned these into advantages by saying it makes the debugging simpler.

The software part of the installation uses basic, which makes it easy for the students to use since we also started studying that.

He also gave the commands that are specific to the hardware, such as assigning which of the 13 pins in the 2 ports are input and which are output.

There were also commands for simulating or assigning input to some of the pins, which works well with trouble shooting parts of the overall circuit.

It was just a bit annoying that the students (while I stayed at the back) were mostly talking at the same time as the speaker.

I was all poised to tell them that I will not be answering questions if they are to ask me to repeat parts of the lecture for them, or to just ask them to step outside and continue their discussion there, since they obviously aren't listening anyway and will be asking about aspects of the lesson again later when they are supposed to be understanding them.

One of the students, the last one that we asked for their schedule, also inquired about what happened to the supposed merging of the lab classes, but I will talk about that later.

Session 1841 is physically present but attention is elsewhere. Class dismissed.