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 Manual Drafting classes for the twelfth week of the second term, we had their second to the last plate.

Yes, it was again one plate for the whole period. And returning to the previous weeks, it was one plate again for the “morning” class and one plate for the “afternoon” class instead of having two or more different plates assigned to just one class.

And this time, the plate is worth forty five points instead of thirty points, which was the maximum number of points they could earn for one meeting – previously.

How was this more advanced or more complicated than their previous plates? They are now required to complete all six orthogonal views given just two. So from the front and top views, the were supposed to give the right view (which they have done before) plus the left side, the bottom and the back.

Not only that, they were still required to give the isometric depiction, and make sure that they would all fit in their plate with nearly the same scale (in other words, one drawing should not be much, much larger or much, much smaller than the other.

And since giving the back, left side and bottom of any of the previous plates would not have been very challenging because most of the former figures would only result in nearly entirely flat featureless surfaces, I had to come up with new plates that had hidden lines already incorporated.

In fact what I did for both classes was that the front view of both their plates were the same, but the top views were different, resulting in radically different views for the rest of the sides and in the isometric.

There were students who asked about their finals. I told them that the finals would be one plate which is worth ninety points, and their grade would be computed from the accumulation of all the points from all the plates.

Maybe I will adjust this though, because they are poised to get a maximum of three hundred sixty points for all the plates. Adding ninety points for the finals would mean there would be a total of four hundred and fifty points, with the finals being only one fifth of their entire grade.

I will probably increase it to give some students a better chance to catch up to the grade they want, not including their special project of a solid figure of the previous plates for the next students of this class, which next school year would already be Graphics One. That is something we have to clear out with the older students and the dean, as would play havoc with the prerequisites and the transcripts.

Session 877 had disproportionate scales. Class dismissed.