What did “I” miss

5/21/2025 – Vincent Zhao

I felt as if some rubric aspects have been unfortunately overlooked upon in terms of my evaluations this year. I would like to write a short blog post detailing the specifics of this criteria.

In one of the first assignments of the year, all members of the cohort were asked to self-study or demonstrate proficiency in three tasks: CAD, Robotics, and Coding. In this case, I was able to successfully complete all three of them, regardless of if they were a refresher activity for me to take on again, or a new topic that I had to learn. For the “Robotics systems & Control” part of the three projects, I was unfortunately not given a mark at all for this part, even though it was the specific and primary underlying area to grade. I was able to successfully follow a tutorial for an Arduino kit. Here is the link to said post.

As a reflection of that project, I indicated that I “took robotics in both grade 8 and 9, and spent an entire term learning Arduino during my grade 9 semester of robotics.” Thus, this aspect of the rubric should be reevaluated for my case.

Next, I would like to comment on the “Fabrication and Implementation” aspect of the rubric. In this case, I received an “insufficient evidence” grade for the project – I assume that it comes from my planet exploration project. In that project, I reflected highly on how one group member assisted in the physical creation of the prototype the most. However, even if he helped the most in actually making it, there were many constraints due to winter break and undersized 3d print material. I assisted many times in the soldering of our drone project, and contributed the most in designing the first CAD prototype. Just because I contributed less in this area does not mean that there is no evidence of me demonstrating this skill. Furthermore, I would like to point out that in my most recent personal project, I was able to demonstrate this skill once again by using IBM’s Qiskit simulator as the primary tool to build and test quantum error correction circuits, applying appropriate techniques from quantum computing and coding. Although my prototype was digital, I used the available software tools to simulate real-world hardware limitations.