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.

For this term I'm giving my third year engineering students something to sink their mind-teeth in besides academics: the Brain Age game I've been talking about in the student accessible version.

Starting last Friday (for some) and yesterday (for the rest) I told them they could train for a few minutes a day for the whole term.

I said it's not a requirement, but that I will be monitoring their results regularly and comparing it to their class performance.

Some of them even suspected that it's my graduate thesis, which is not the case.

I just want to find out how well the training really works, among those who are really motivated to try it out for themselves and who are just doing it because of the grade compensation.

As for my Intermediate Robotics Lab class, which had their first session recently, our first exercise was to make the parallel port cable work, something to get them a bit ahead of their Interfacing Computer Systems class, which will concentrate on a microprocessor board anyway, according to the teachers handling it.

This class only has enough for two groups (of four and five members each - although I am thinking of now three groups of three members each), which is small compared to the other class that has almost twenty students enrolled. And one of the students, who doesn't want to be paired up with a student who courted her before (or at least expressed interest) has even moved from the smaller class to the larger class, saying that it was the registrar's office that done that.

And now there is also some sort of rivalry between the two classes, as the earlier-in-the-week smaller class who finished the first exercise due to an intellectual discovery on their part (that they were reading the pin numbers of the parallel port backwards, which was why they were not getting the correct output on their LEDs) now does not want to tell the other class about how they finished it, and in fact do not want the other class to be using their completed circuits.

Session 1819 has some notions about relationships with teachers and students that have to be rethought. Class dismissed.