Well, week 5 and 6 are behind us. They didn’t go too terribly. But one thing that is on my mind this semester for this course is logistics. When do we collect, where to store animals, equipment, how does it work in the new building, etc. Week 5 started off on Monday with us troubleshooting digitizing and kinematics. I had assignments due, but noticed several students were missing them. So, we spend most of Monday getting everyone caught up. I had tutorials, and even I should have rewatched them as our research lab does not use Tracker to digitize any more. But we all got it figured out. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again that troubleshooting the programs and different operating systems and different versions, is one of the biggest hurdles of the class. Not getting videos, but the downstream. That week we had a lecture on jumping and used the rest of Wednesday to continue discussing projects. Week 6 had us going back out to Irvine for collecting. The weather that day was tricky as there had been chances of rain leading up to it, but I decided to go. And we were more focused as we had better ideas of projects. So, we were able to focus on collecting. We got what we needed which was nice. Wednesday of Week 6 saw our last lecture on flight and further discussions of projects.
This third iteration is different than the previous two. We’re back in person, but we’re doing less round robin discussions of projects, but we’re also not all working independently. It looks like we will have ~6 projects, three in pairs, three solo. This is just where interests and things have gone. Two projects are based on marine invertebrates, which wouldn’t have been possible without another faculty working and collecting them. But it is good to keep that in mind for future projects.