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Robotics
When I was in second year at Carleton, I helped Sean Hay and his team-mates with their robot. Sure, I skipped some classes, got some bad grades, but I was hooked, and it was worth it.
I knew I wanted to work on a robot for my fourth-year engineering design project, and I convinced instructor Tom Ray to let me do something cool. I ended up designing and building an autonomous six-legged walking robot called ITSY.
Sessional lecturer teaching experience
During my first year of my Masters degree, I helped Prof. John Knight with a student landmine-detection project, but I was still more interested in robotics. Prof. Knight had previously taught several robotics courses and gave me his notes and files at the end of the year.
I convinced the Dept. of Electronics that I should run a fourth-year project the next year, raised about $18k from CUESEF, spent the summer reworking the cirriculum, and hand-picked eighteen students to ensure success. They had no idea what they were signing up for. Neither did I!
2000-2001: RoboTag
The first course, RoboTag - Autonomous mobile robots playing tag, consisted of six teams of three students built pairs of robots designed to play autonomous (ie: uncontrolled) games of flashlight tag.
It was very successful. Everyone worked really hard and the robots were fantastic. The final competition drew 200+ people and we received some media attention.
2001-2002: RoboFlag
The second course, RoboFlag - Autonomous mobile robots playing capture the flag, consisted of six teams of students who built robots that played together to capture the other team's flag and drag it back to their own side. Some teams had both defensive and offensive strategies, different maze-navigation techniques, and different levels of cooperation with teammate robots.
This project was also successful, but it was technically more difficult than RoboTag, and the students and I were under a lot more stress to meet the course goals. Everything worked out in the end, with epic amounts of work from both sides. The final competition was great, we had some 300+ people with media attention.