CTP Skill Center

Today the CTT students spent the day with Jacob and the PRO. We had an interesting session where we practiced saying no to a customer in a polite way and sort of hold our ground to the company policy. The objective is to deny the customer request and offering alternatives and not just turning them down. Each one in the PRO and CTT class got their turn to play this role in fromt of the class. Next we watched a Ted Talk titled Realities of Memorable Service by Alex Cabanas that emphasized that is easy to go the extra mile because the bar is so low.

The last hour was reserved to finish the CTT Robot Coding Assignment.

Today Alex continued our journey into logic by asking us to help create pseudo code for a Number Guessing Game. It was fun trying to think of the errors in the code which often programmers may tend to forget satisfied that one has a working code but not might be fool proof. We continued with the Coding Robotics Assignment using mBot and I was satisfied with our progress.

Today I made the mBot do a dance and a light show! I also learned how to test batteries using a voltage checker. As a class we created a theoretical program for a number guessing game.

Today everybody got a taste of programming using pseudo code. Alex gave a hypothetical example of code to run in a vending machine. It was a fun practice figuring out the logic by looking and simulating how a vending machine should be programmed to respond. Our project for the week is working with the mBot robot platform and learn coding fundamentals using lessons developed by Saul.

Today I learned about Programming. We did a thought exercise where we programmed a theoretical Vending Machine.

Today at Employment Services we started answering some interview questions that we shared with Aubrey. We also did a mock interview using the same questions with two partners shifting roles as an interviewer and interviewee. I had Greg and Rolanda as my partners and we all had productive sessions. The practice helps a lot in gaining confidence as well as being able to respond correctly and effectively to an interview question.

Today Alex shared an intriguing problem he had when he re-imaged 6 computers at the Scott classroom. 3 computer was imaged correctly but the remaining 3 others had a blank screen. On these problem computers the caps lock turned on but with a delay and was obviously doing something in the background. So we did a troubleshooting simulation offering different suggestion of what most likely caused the problem. The solution was not straightforward and Alex revealed that when he compared the BIOS settings of a working to a non-working computer he noticed that one was set to legacy and the other was set to auto and most likely choose UEFI. A setting overlooked can cause a big problem which can be falsely diagnosed as something else.

Alex added another criteria on the Network Assignment by connecting a wired network printer via DHCP and also via static assignment. We were able to do both and tomorrow we will try ping, nslookup and trace route on the network we made.

Today we discussed the problems we had yesterday in setting up our network. There were a number of issues with resetting the router and having interfering routers with the same SSID. However, the crucial information that Alex clarified was to check the IP address of the computers we were using if they were using the previous configurations they had and making sure they belong to the same network. Making sure that the the computers are getting their IP address from the DHCP server instead of what it was before is a critical step. Using ipconfig, ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew in the command line is useful in this task. The assignment was modified to use a dynamic and static IP and also using a different network such as 10.10.10.0 aside from 192.168.1.0 which is the default in the router.

Today we did a review of networking with Omar a new student at CTT. Our ticket for today was to build a network using the basic building block as a template. The network will be composed of a Wireless router, 2 PCs and a laptop. We have to do a hardware reset on the router and configure both wireless and wired connectivity. We had a slow start with a router that was acting weird so we had to change it. We were able to connect the PCs to the router but did not have internet on the laptop. However, we were able to connect using other wireless devices.

Today at Employment Services each of one shared our overall experience in the recently concluded Career Fair. It seems everyone observed the same things that I did such as the venue being too small, the number of applicants, companies that were not there, etc. It was an opportunity to experience and be better prepared the next time around knowing what to expect in these kinds of events. It was a chance to develop networking skills and practice our spiels akin to the interview sessions we did in class.

I edited a few items in my LinkedIn profile and hopefully the changes are okay. Aubrey checked in with everyone and I was up to date on my tasks. The last part of the class is showing our LinkedIn profile. One final thing to do for the day is reaching out to the contacts I made in the Career Fair.