Week 11 Tutorial: Clinic week

Two parallel tracks — a code clinic and a make clinic — the last studio time before the final

10 May 2027

Before the session#

Bring your final project plan from week 9 and whatever’s furthest behind — code, or a physical build.

In the session#

1. Decide which clinic track you need first, based on your final project plan from week 9 and whatever’s furthest behind on it. The honest version of this question isn’t “which half do I enjoy” but “which half of my plan would fail if I tried to demo it today” — most final projects fail by neglecting the half of the toolkit their author was never confident in, not the half they chose to lead with.
2. Go to the code clinic or the make clinic — there’s no single schedule. Both tracks run at the same time, in different parts of the studio, for the whole session, because a wiring fault and a state-machine bug don’t share a bottleneck: putting them on one shared schedule would mean queuing behind a tutor mid-explanation of the other half’s material. Instead each track runs continuously with a tutor dedicated to it:
   • Code clinic (Idris) covers serial comms, state machines and rule systems, and the creative-coding side of your pipeline.
   • Make clinic (Marisol) covers wiring faults, sensor and actuator problems, scanning and projection setup, and fabrication file prep.
3. Work on whichever half of the project you brought, with a tutor from that track on hand. A good session here ends with the specific fault fixed or the specific pattern understood well enough that you could reproduce it yourself afterward — not just watched a tutor fix it while you held the board.
4. Move to the other clinic at any point if your final project needs both. Most final projects do, since the plan from week 9 already commits you to three-plus techniques spanning both halves of the loop. The clinic student to avoid becoming is the one who parks in whichever track feels comfortable for the whole session and never crosses over — they leave clinic week having reinforced their strong half and arrive at the final crit with one entire half of the toolkit still untouched.

Afterwards#

Nothing is marked this week. It exists so nobody arrives at the final crit having spent the whole semester avoiding their weaker half.