Robotics: An alternative to Prime Number Syndrome?

[Richard Wallace]

Excerpt from Georgia Tech Alumni News:

Georgia Tech is among the institutions that are shifting away from computer science and choosing to focus on more specific fields, like bioengineering and robotics, the Chronicle said. Robotics students at Georgia Tech "spent the semester teaching robots to draw shapes, to chirp on command and to navigate obstacle courses," the publication noted.

Tucker Balch, an associate professor at Georgia Tech, told the AP that the course is an attempt to combat "prime number" syndrome. That disease, he said, afflicts computer science departments that typically ask newcomers to write dull programs performing mathematical algorithms.

[edit]Yes, I am an alumnus of the Georgia Institute of Technology. BEE'83, MSEE'85, PhDEE'90. I only took one course in Robotics, and that one had no hands-on content -- all theory. Glad to see things are changing.[/edit]

I never thought of prime numbers as being especially dull, but I will agree that building and programming robots is much more interesting.

Random thought: if you've built a robot that can draw shapes, it might be interesting to have it draw spirographs; i.e., periodic functions plotted in polar coordinates, with angular periodicity based on ratios of prime numbers so they take many revolutions to repeat, and end up describing flower-like patterns.