What an incredibly long day. I awoke at 7:15 to leave for school, and then had that calculus exam. Between 10:20 and 12:30 I tutored, then after Physics class we had our robotics project meeting. I decided to build a base much like the tank-style one in the Mindstorms Constructopedia (but with a better processor and sensor system.) I'm most likely going to be doing a subsumption-style architecture... nerves, signals, responses etc.
From 5PM to 7:30 I tutored in theory of computation... we went over the correspondence between NFA and regular expressions, conversion of NFA to DFA, lambda transitions, etc etc etc. What a long process. Many of the students had inadequate discrete maths background, so if we are talking about how the transition function of a DFA is going to map {states}x{alphabet} --> {states} and they don't know what the cartesian product of sets is... eeh. I hear some of them are on their third try with this course! I can't blame them, really. I have been to several state schools here, and Discrete Maths is not taught very well. Plus, this is a 7AM course that combines day and night students, and some of the night people haven't had discrete math in years!
I'm not really sure what to do. From what they tell me, their understanding is helped by the explanations and examples, so maybe it will be enough. To get them through. Otherwise they don't graduate :-( the course is required.
I have a 3-day weekend coming up. I can't wait to attack Octal and get some more coding done. There will be a developer's release this weekend, including plugin-testing interactive bits and the revised/finished API.