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.

Last night there were five missed calls on my phone and one panicked text message from one of the students who are to report in Advanced Robotics class today, who couldn't find anything in the net on the topic they picked from the list I provided.

My only reply was why they only told me this late, and suggested they check if the next group who is supposed to present after them are ready to take over, even though they are set for two weeks from now.

I was expecting several exchanges after that, but there were no further pleas.

It was either they didn't get their message, or they did get the next group to move up, or they finally found something they could use.

This morning I discovered that it was the third option, although they made it a point to emphasize in their speech how difficult it was to search.

Their plight was even evident in all the typographical errors in their slide presentation, which they said was made at 2 in the morning.

They actually just found one component fitting the topic I gave, so it was more or less a verbal technical specification of that component.

The group that presented before them ended up overstepping the coverage of the next group to present next meeting. When the next group told me about this, I just told them to make a better report.

As it turns out, that won't be such a difficult thing, because the first group concentrated more on the theoretical side.

They even went into how to use the component as a generator instead of as a sensor.

They didn't have any graphs of the relationship between the temperature and the voltage, although they said they read somewhere that it was non-linear.

For their sample applications, they didn't even provide schematics of the circuits, or explain exactly how the temperature was measured.

In their water heater example, they didn't say if the thermocouple would have to be immersed to get a temperature reading.

There was also no price list provided. In my grade book, it's the lowest scoring report so far, despite the detailed research.

Session 1879 studied on something other than what the teacher was asking. Class dismissed.