Tuesday, January 10, 2017

NCSS 2017 Day 7

Nearly Project time...

Today is Monday, we had normal lectures and labs and then Programming comp as the evening activity.

Morning Lecture
The first lecture was about Analogue to Digital Conversion and Digital to Analogue simulation. Followed by a fun session on using software and lots of time to create your own PCB maps for creation. Not sure if this is something in my future but it was fun finding out the practicalities of this stuff.


Morning Lab
The students I'm working with are still trying to get their robot moving consistently. It's moving forwards and backwards and I talked them through the algorithm we're going to use for following a line. They then focused on reading from the light sensors and working out what those numbers mean. The DAC lab will have to wait.


Afternoon Lecture
The second lecture was about different ways to communicate with devices using the micro:bit and some of the pros and cons. We then had a high-level overview of the project ready to be put into teams.


Afternoon Lab
The students I'm working with have been hacking away at their line-following code all afternoon and they're getting frustrated. I've discovered that the sensor and input management is working just fine. It's something with the motors but we ran out of time. At least they seem happy with their team for the project and I'll have another crack at debugging tomorrow morning while the lecture is on.


Programming Comp
I love programming comp. The teachers didn't place this year but considering our overall experience level with Python we did really well and the "experienced" team didn't even get tutor help so I'm proud of our performance. Go team! My favourite question was a secret message hidden in pi where you had to convert each char in pi to and int and then it's bin representation and then jam the binary strings together - the message was hidden in the resulting data string with starting addresses given for each letter and then the following 8 binary digits making up the ASCII code for the letter. - Beautiful! Well done organising team.

100011111011111101111110010010000010011101101001110011111010001110100100001

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