Stage 6 of 6 · The log, the day, and what comes after
Exam day & log
Half of Week 7's grade never touches the exam paper: the reflection log is worth as much as the midterm, and it rewards exactly the opposite skill, looking backward honestly instead of answering forward quickly. This page is its full guide, then the logistics and craft of the exam itself.
The reflection log
The log (10%) is an engineer's record of your own learning across Weeks 1 to 6: one entry per week, plus a short synthesis. It exists for a documented reason, not as ritual: putting experience into words, what was attempted, what failed, what you now understand differently, is itself a learning act, the core of what professionals call reflective practice, and it is why engineers, pilots and scientists keep logbooks. You have been feeding it all term without ceremony: the journal notes, exit tickets and "note this for Week 7" prompts scattered through the hubs are its raw material. Due Monday, October 19; the submission format is announced on Omnivox.
The entry template
One entry per week, four moves each, half a page in total per entry as a sane guideline:
| Move | Prompt | Example of the register |
|---|---|---|
| Built | What did you actually make or make work? | "Got the Pi headless: imaged, hostnamed, SSH'd in on the second try." |
| Broke | What failed, and what did the failure turn out to be? | "Push rejected for twenty minutes; the remote had my partner's commit and I had never pulled." |
| Understood after | What do you see now that you did not see during? | "Commit and push are different acts; I had been treating commit as 'save to GitHub'." |
| Evidence | One concrete pointer into your own work | "Commit a3f91c2 in week2-setup; the conflict resolution is visible in the diff." |
Close the log with a synthesis entry: a paragraph on how the six weeks connect, in your own words. The honest version of that paragraph is also the best possible final revision for the exam, which is not a coincidence.
What makes an entry good
| Weak | Strong | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| "Week 3 was about security. It went well." | "Locked myself out by enabling UFW before allowing 22, exactly the mistake the hub warned about; re-flashed and did it in order." | Specific events can be reflected on; summaries cannot |
| Polished, error-free term | Honest record, failures included, with what each failure taught | The log grades reflection, not performance; a term with no recorded errors reads as a term with no recorded attention |
| Restating the hub's content | Your experience colliding with the content | The hubs already exist; only you can write what happened at your bench |
| Six disconnected entries | Entries that notice threads: the timer thread, the verification habit, state finding a home | Connection is the skill the whole course is building, and the synthesis entry asks for it outright |
Assembly workflow
Gather, one hour
Open your journal notes, your
station.txtfiles andgit log --onelinein each week's repository. Commits are time-stamped memory anchors: the moment a message changes from "stuff" to "fix conflict in main.py", something was learned, and the log wants that something.Draft week by week
Four moves per week, template above, in order. Where a week's notes are thin, the week's hub checklist is a memory prompt: which boxes do you remember earning?
Write the synthesis last
After six entries the threads are visible; name two or three and trace them across the weeks.
Submit early
Per the Omnivox instructions, before exam day, so Monday morning owes you nothing but the paper.
Exam day: what to bring
| Bring | Leave home |
|---|---|
| Two pens, a pencil and eraser for diagrams, your student ID | The breadboard kit (unless told otherwise in class) |
| A simple calculator for the resistor arithmetic, unless told otherwise | Notes and devices, per the usual exam rules announced in class |
| A watch or sightline to the room clock, for budgeting | The urge to study in the corridor at 14:25; it trades calm for nothing |
Usual time and room, Monday, October 19, 14:30, D-221, unless Omnivox says otherwise. Sleep is a revision strategy: memory consolidates during it, which makes a full night before the exam worth more than the same hours spent cramming into it.
Working a paper exam
- Read the whole paper first, two minutes. You will answer better knowing what is coming, and your background memory starts working on the hard questions early.
- Budget by points: a 6-point question deserves three times the minutes of a 2-point one, roughly points-to-minutes at a 75-to-100 pace. Stuck past budget, mark it, move, return.
- Show the work the marking rewards: formula, substitution, units for the math; a drawn table for every trace; the
Class.method(instance, ...)rewrite when asked aboutself. Partial credit lives in visible method. - Write pseudocode in the course's conventions; they are accepted by definition, and consistency reads as competence.
- Trace, never simulate in your head: the planted traps in trace questions are exactly the ones mental execution glosses over.
- Attempt everything: a correct formula with no final number, or a labelled diagram half-finished, is points; a blank is a certainty of zero.
The final checklist
After the exam: Week 8
Week 8 · Monday, October 26
The second computer
The ESP32 microcontroller joins your bench: analog sensing (the physical world is not just on and off), a second machine beside the Pi, and the first piece of the course's full architecture, sensor node to network to Pi, that carries through to December.
Released Week 8
Assignment 2
The PID light-harvesting brief lands as a requirements document in exactly the house style you are revising, and its implementation will want exactly the classes Week 6 taught. The midterm's material is not behind you after Monday; it is the floor you stand on.