On Wednesday of last week I got a surprising IM, EC and my former FIRST Robotics team were in town. I expected them Thursday, but they decided to come a day earlier for logistical reasons, and so began a long, hectic, fun week. I left from work to Coolidge Corner (where their hotel was) directly. Coincidentally WND was also in Coolidge that day, which made for easy planning. I went and said hi to EC and Mike who were already at the nearest Radio Shack (of course), but they had eaten, so I went and had dinner with my dinner group at a run of the mill Indian restaurant called Rani. I didn’t think it was as good as India Quality from a few months back.
After dinner I went up and lent a mentoring hand to Tessa with the robot code. Tessa, on her first year programing was doing impressively well, and she had at least one well organized component design team member helping her out. The programing mentor for this year didn’t make the trip, so Tessa has some questions, which I tried to clear up. I wasn’t much help. She fixed it the next day, and it wasn’t anything I said it might be. I was also happy to see echo’s of the methods and design I tough two years ago had been passed down by the girls, and were evident in this years code. I had tired really hard to find an easy, straight froward design to weave together the code the girls were writing. This was for the very purpose that, with a good design (the hard part) laid out the girls could take more ownership of the code, and not have things bog down as they easily could with a bad design. That this is exactly what has happened makes me very happy. More to follow as I have time to write it.
