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 first meeting of my second Introduction to Robotics class during the first week, of course I distributed to them the kits they were supposed to use for the duration of the term.

This was even before I had sorted things out and counted the parts that they were supposed to be given.

Why did I do this? I did this because some visitors showed up and said that they had were going to take pictures of the classes of the school “in motion” for their magazine.

This would have been nice if they did not show up on the first week of classes, when people are just getting started and not really doing much picture-worthy, particularly in the laboratories, but then again, it is what we have to deal with running on trimester-paced minds in a semester-set world. Our calendar is always out of sync with the rest of the country.

So I started them out in the training software, and they got into the mode of seeing sensors and motors at work when properly connected and given the right commands to follow.

Naturally, since it was the first meeting and they had not brought their own batteries for their portable processors yet, I had to give them some of the ones that were left by the Intermediate Robotics classes last term.

In fact, I also had to disassemble (read: wreck) some of the projects from that class, because they used the wires and the motors from the kits for their final project.

So I warned those students (some sophomores, some juniors) that if they wanted their projects to be displayed – and demonstrated – permanently in the robotics lab for the younger batches to see, they shouldn’t use parts from the reusable kits.

The photographer and the director were asking if the students could be shown actually assembling robots with wheels.

I said that point could be reached if they just wait while the students went through the training of building a robot. I would have asked them to go somewhere else in the campus first then come back later, but they had already done that.

Session 933 has no wheels. Class dismissed.