There is no Advanced Robotics class on 11/23 due to the thanksgiving holiday. Our next class will be held on 11/30.

What: 2009 Explorer Post Expo
When: Monday, December 14th, 2009 7:00-8:30PM
Where: EP6 Conference Center (same as First Night)
Why: Engineering is awesome

All current Explorers and their families are invited to our 2009 Expo Night. Each project will have a display that will show their accomplishments. You may even get a chance to ride on the hovercraft! Refreshments will be served.

With the weather getting colder, it's time to start meeting closer to our room. Click on this message to see a map of the new location.

Explorers, Your mission this week:

• Complete the two-player War card game. Online rules are available if you are unfamiliar with the game.
• Layout the objects and methods you would need for an adventure game, like we discussed in class. You don't need to worry about the actual Python code just yet. Some simple lists in an email would be fine.

We will now switch to the book I gave you in class, Think Python. Use the online version to cut and paste the examples.

Note: Week 4 was an open coding session with no specific assignment.

Team Python,

This week we reviewed my solution to the tic-tac-toe program. You can try to modify this code to improve the computer's strategy or extend it to support 3D tic-tac-toe. I will upload the other solutions later this week.

• Finish the reading the remaining sections of the tutorial.
• Work through the three programs described in the handout. For the Rock-Paper-Scissors, try to prove by experiment that the odds of winning are 1 out of 3.
• Send us any code you create or any questions you have.
• We can now move to the "real" Python documentation. Start using the official tutorial and library reference to answer your questions. If you can't find something in the documentation, let us know.

Python Explorers, even though Liverpool has canceled classes, we will still have our meeting tonight.

No class on 10/12, next session is 10/19.

In observance of Columbus day we will not be having class on Monday 10/12. This makes our next session on 10/19. We will be talking about Servo motors, and we'll learn to make the robots move around.

Team, thanks again for your participation tonight. We reviewed last week's assignment and worked on a program that plays Tic-Tac-Toe. For next week:

• PLEASE email us with any code you create or if you have any problems.
• Read the tutorial up to page 71.
• Sign up for an account on sf.net and email us your username.
• Complete a program that plays Tic-Tac-Toe OR complete the Rock Paper Scissors program described in this PDF.
• If you finish, consider writing a program that calculates the odds of winning Rock, Paper, Scissors is 1/3 if both players choose randomly. You will need to have the computer play itself many times to show this.
• If you have trouble, take a look at the other two problems in the handout (guessing game and pig latin). You should be able to complete the guessing game. The pig latin one is more challenging (we'll tackle it next week). Good luck!

Explorers, thanks for helping us kickoff this year's Python project.

Your mission this week is to install Python on your computer and try out some example programs in the tutorial.

If you have any questions, please let us know by emailing python (a)(t) post6201.org.

• Check out http://python.org for download links for a variety of operating systems. The Python 2.6.3 Windows installer is what most of you will need.
• Please read the first seven chapters of the Non-Programmers Tutorial for Python PDF Link
• At the very least, try to create the "Area" program described at the end of chapter 7. Email it to us for extra special credit.

Finally, you can subscribe to the Python Project RSS feed by using http://www.post6201.org/backend/6201python.rdf in your favorite news reader!