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 Feedback and Control Systems lab class, since we turned out to have only six experiments instead of seven, the rest of the term is supposed to be allotted for the construction of their project. I told them about it two meetings before, but no one showed up in class with a proposal, so one entire meeting was spent for them to come up with one per group.

I already gave them the leeway of using our existing robotics system for their project, since that at least ensures that whatever they produce will be documented and can be repeated by the succeeding classes, maybe even the high school students.

But they were not forced to use the kits; they could make their own, and one of the three groups did.

The important thing that I told them to add pressure is that whatever they made will be displayed during the engineering week, so it really has to be impressive.

And since we have been using software from the start of the term to teach them the theoretical and computational aspects of feedback, I had to go back to square one to teach them some physical and mechanical feedback systems we have.

The simplest is still the water closet of a toilet. If the water is below a certain level, water will pour in. When the water reaches a certain level, the water will stop.

One group will be simulating this using a robot, and a floater in a tube with a touch sensor on top.

The second said they wanted to reproduce the automatic door opening mechanism.

The last one, not using the kits, will create an automatic re-charger for a mobile phone or batteries.

I also had to have them research on the proper parts of a scientific proposal online, since apparently it was not discussed in their English classes before.

I had to explain what an abstract is for (when they couldn’t understand the online definition either) and the difference between rationale and significance of the study.

They should have a technical writing course like we did in college, because that helped me a lot.

Session 1549 thought a project proposal had to be in letter form which it isn’t. Class dismissed.