seriously, though, awesome!

I saw your presentation on Ruby-USB at confreaks and it was very helpful. I am actually trying to do something with RubyUSN and running into trouble. I thought I could post a comment here and if you have any insights, it would help. (My apologies for posting the comment on a totally unrelated post)

I installed the Ruby-USB gem in Windows and then tried to use IRB to see if I can detect USB devices on my syste. I tried the following -
require ‘USB’
USB.devices

This always returned [], even though there are devices present. Any clue why it is not listing the devices?

Thanks for your help and good luck with your PhD

Now that I’m a RealDeveloper ™ I would be much more likely to go all the way through the tutorial… (just having documentation is a pretty awesome thing), so with experience I would definitely go through the tutorial…

I totally sympathize with your point; I’ve debated this myself, and decided to not require it for reasons Pro2 (plus a bit of Pro1 and Pro3). I’m a bit worried about 1, but it’s unclear if the students who succumb to 1 will do more than the bare minimum of any assignment we give. In the end, I will probably add something required if it becomes apparent folks haven’t done it. But, I want students to view this as a senior seminar, not a “class where I’ll be spoon-fed.”

In the other class I’m using Unity in, we had a simple warmup (do some modifications of Unity).

Once we get the Android environment set up, we will assign something trivial so everyone builds something. That will help. But, in the end, I will largely judge people by the overall success of their project, combined with what their teammates say their contributions are (perhaps I need to make this clearer?) so that folks will need to contributed. I anticipate giving A’s, B’s and some C’s, but hopefully nobody in the class will earn F’s (perhaps I need to make this clearer, too?).