UptownMaker

I'll attempt a bit of subterfuge and obfuscation here so I don't inadvertently ruffle too many feathers... A friend just sent me a summary of the EE capstone projects from this year's crop of students at a university that shall go unnamed. Bright-eyed young engineers, fun problems, innovative solutions, yadda-yadda-yadda. Pretty much anyone reading this has a pretty good mental image of what might have been in the e-mail, and many of you LIVED it. But then, right at the end, was an incredibly troubling BTW: PS: professor's name here told me that he does not allow Arduinos to be used on these projects, since it makes things too easy (at this level of education, they're supposed to be learning the stuff that Arduino hides from you). Better he was there than me. I'd have lost my shit if an engineering prof said something like that to me. I get what he's saying- that the journey is the point, not the destination- it's just that for everything else...

Side note- it's been a looong time since I wrote a blog post. Since then, I've had a second child, moved jobs (I'm now working at SparkFun - woot!), states (Colorado is state number six for me), and time zones. A lot of the more technical sort of blog post I'd write now goes up on the SparkFun website as tutorials, but I'm going to try to post more here. Engineers and scientists (and other general nerd/geek types) like to talk about "numeracy", which is the ability of a person to grok math. It used to be that the primary "complaint" (if you will) was about people who play the lottery- "a tax on being bad at math". I'm not talking about valuation, here- being willing to pay five- to tenfold as much for a meal at a restaurant as it would cost to make at home, for instance. I'm talking about hard numbers- apples to apples. Having a poor grasp on mathematics is getting to be a bigger handicap, though. I've notice recently wh...