Comment by mandevil
3 days ago
I took and then TA'd a class where the semester long project was to control robots (it was a software engineering principles class, the actual code writing could be done in a single weekend, but you had to do all the other stuff of software engineering- requirements analysis and documentation etc).
We had a software simulator of the robots, and the first lab was everyone dutifully writing the code that worked great on the simulator, and only then did we unlock the real robots and give you 2-3 minutes with the real robot. And the robot never moved that first lab, because the simulator had a bug, and didn't actually behave like the real robot did. We didn't deliberately design the robot that way, it came like that, but in a decade of doing the class we never once tried to fix the simulator because that was an incredibly important lesson we wanted to teach the students: documentation lies. Simulators aren't quite right. Trust no one, not even your mentor/TA/Professor.
We did not actually grade anyone on their robot failing to move, no grade was given on that first lab experience because everyone failed to move the robot. But they still learned the lesson.
> because the simulator had a bug
I had something similar happen when I was taking microcomputers (a HW/SW codesign class at my school). We had hand-built (as in everything was wire wrapped) 68k computers we were using and could only download our code over a 1200-baud serial line. Needless to say, it was slow as hell, even for the day (early 2000s). So, we used a 68k emulator to do most of our development work and testing.
Late one night (it was seriously like 1 or 2 am), our prof happened by the lab as we were working and asked to see how it was going. I was project lead and had been keeping him apprised and was confident we were almost complete. After waiting the 20 minutes to download our code (it was seriously only a couple dozen kb of code), it immediately failed, yet we could show it worked on the simulator. We single-stepped through the code (the only "debugger" we had available was a toggle switch for the clock and an LED hex readout of the 16-bit data bus). I had spent enough time staring at the bus over the course of the semester that I'd gotten quite good at decoding the instructions in my head. I immediately saw that we were doing a word-compare (16-bit) instead of a long-compare (32-bit) on an address. The simulator treated all address compares are 32-bit, regardless of the actual instruction. The real hardware, of course, did not. It was a simple fix. Literally one-bit. Did it in-memory on the computer instead of going through the 20-minute download again. Everything magically worked. Professor was impressed, too.
Just out of curiosity, were you up-front after the fact that this was part of the exercise?
We had a first-semester freshman year course that all incoming students were required to take. The first assignment in that class was an essay, pretty typical stuff, I don't even remember what about.
A day after handing it in, roughly half of the class would be given a formal academic citation for plagiarism. That half of the class hadn't cited their sources. "This one time only", the citation could be removed if the students re-submitted an essay with a bibliography.
While it was obvious, in hindsight, that the point of the exercise was to get you to understand that the university took plagiarism seriously, especially with the "this one time only" string attached, it felt dishonest in that nobody ever came out and said so. I luckily wasn't on the receiving end of one of those citations, but I can only imagine the panic of a typical first-semester freshman being formally accused of plagiarism.
If someone complained to us TAs during or after the lab that the simulators were incorrect, we were quite open that indeed they were, and that was not our doing, but we were okay with it because lying documentation was a part of the real world.
The professor had been doing the class with those robots for several years when I took the class the first time, but I don't know if he acquired that brand of robots because their simulator was broken or if that was just a happy accident that he took advantage of.
The lesson certainly has stuck with me- this was one lab in a class I took almost a quarter-century ago and I vividly remember both the frustration of not moving the robot and the frustration of everyone in the sections that I TA'd.
Right. I'm all for making freshmen learn it early but this is just hazing.