The location for the Magic Engineering class is inside a medium-sized classroom with only 20 tables and a stack of chairs near the entrance. The classroom is arranged in the form of an amphitheater in front of a large board to allow demonstrations of gadgets and experiments in front of the students' ravenous eyes.
Magic cooling system runs its maximum input outside as the sound of air pumps and exhausts slightly reach the inside even if the room is covered with noise-cancelling panels. The temperature, therefore, is kept at a constant 25 degree Celsius to demonstrate lab conditions. As the class begins to get crowded, a blond girl, Elanor, and a plain, brow guy, Joe, join his table. Both decides to keep their surnames to themselves and Simon is fine with that. Despite the awkward first contact, the three: Simon and his team members, quickly loosen up and begin to share contact info to find one another for help if needed. Simon's intuition is telling him to make friends with everyone, to act and behave chummy with everyone. The three begins talking about various things regarding themselves (basic introductory) and their understanding of Magic Engineering. While Joe is about to discuss the differences between the Northern and Southern style of Magic Engineering when a petite woman enter the classroom, carrying with her a stack reaching over her head. With a loud thump, she drops the stack she is holding onto the teacher table before starting the head count. After two minutes of checking, she begins to speak.
"Hello everyone, I am Alene, your instructor for this year of Magic Engineering. Sorry for coming in a bit late as your seniors required special cares from us teachers. If you have the will, visit the workshop to see more for yourself! Now, let me begins with the basics of the basics."
She steps on a gliding ladder like those used in the library to begin writing the word "Conservation" in large bold font. Her mouth never stops talking.
" The foundation of Magic Engineering can be traced back to the ages when alchemy was still dominant. At that time, this concept of conservation of something, for example, matter, was held in high regard. From the dark wizards of the Bazemtyl Empire who used animals and humans sacrifices to create Chimera, very powerful beast combining the traits envisioned by their creators, to those Mages in the first war against the invasion of demon whose weapons rang across the field. Alchemy, now developed further into Magic Engineering, has always been highly sought after for its wide applications and ease of spreading the knowledge. Of course there exist other application of Magic Engineering in fields such as potion-drug making, beauty products, agriculture, aquaculture and many more! The presence of the subject in your daily life has dulled the importance of it in your eyes."
She takes a deep breath before continuing, her hands and position go down a few decimeters and she divided the board into two side: Magic and Magic Engineering.
" Anyone, no, all of you, come up here and make a comparison of the two. There should be enough space for every students to write something. Just what you think, I will base my lesson on that."
Eager chatter among the students whose feet guide them toward the large board. A piece of chalk in their hands, they begin to write. Simon joins the crowd and he begins writing the simple understanding. After a few minutes, the board is filled with white writing and Alene decides to take the most foundation schedule. Whether they have talents and guts or not she does not know but giving them an interesting lesson should be the minimum for a teacher.
Having finished deciding what to do with the students, the short teacher begins to briefly teach them basic alchemy-related spells and methodologies for analyzing objects.
" Basic tests for any material are a must if you encounter anything news. But first we need a basic to form our understanding of the collected data. You at the back , I see you playing cards with your neighbor, tell me some quantities that defines an object's physical existence."
" Length, mass, time, temperature, ... charge? That's all I have known of."
Nodding her head at the partially correct response, Alene begins to explain the reason for her question.
" There are quantities that will help you define an object accurately, seven of them in fact. They are as following with their base units:
Length in meter
Time in second
Mass in kilogram
Charge in coulomb
Temperature in kelvin
Amount of matter in mol
Luminous intensity in candela"
She takes a minute to write the seven basic measurement units down, her petite body presses against the ladder.
" Any further measurements using specialized units can be broken down into a combination of these quantity raised to respective powers. There is actually a technique only focusing onto these quantities that we will be looking into in the near future. I will give you guys some basic exercises to understand what I was talking about and then I will teach you about measurement methods. Look at the first two pages"
She then goes to each students nearest to the steps and order them to spread the papers she has given to others. The 4-paper-8-page stack lands in front of Simon. He can make out a black-and-white schematics of a water barrel and a complex piece of machinery with the name /engine V3'. Written in the margins are various formulas and numbers describing what the writer is calculating about the object.
" In a water barrel as you see in front of you, the major attribute we care at first is the size of it. People care about the volume of water the barrel can hold. They care about the cost that is dependent on the surface area and the weight of the whole thing so that it is easy for transpiration. You guys can see from the first example that to design and create some product is to measure its physical characteristics. Now on the second page you can see something called an engine. Since ancient time when civilization has found a way to create something to aid their transportation without utilizing spirits or pure meta-natural phenomenon such as holy power, divinity or mana. To sum the main purpose, the device you are seeing on the second page is a useful piece of relic from the past which uses natural resources such as coal and oil to produce power for carriages and industrial application.
If any of you wants to look further into the engine, please go to the library and pick up some foundational books for machinery and industrial processes. Now turn on the third page, isn't he familiar to all of you?"
Simon turns the page and a comical golem model greets him with its rocky right hand giving a thumb up. Unlike the previous two pages, the color is mostly brownish with various levels of shadows affecting the lighting of the thing. Curiosity takes over Simon and he flips to the next pages. The next three discuss in details how the methodology of making one in combination with the spells. Not giving him time to look into the final two pages, Alene continues on with the lesson.
" The golem you are seeing in front of you is like a symbol of our Department. It is the first thing any students who study Magic Engineering in tandem with Magic will learn to make as it is easier for you guys to grasp the spells. I already know some of you have made a golem on your own using instructions you bought so I will not delving much into the price of the thing. It is cheap or expensive dependent on the material you choose to use, that's it.
Now we will look into the core of a golem. As you have experienced with casting spells, long-range manipulation of mana is difficult to utilize and maintain due to the limits of human's mind. Then what about golem? They are our tool of widening our operating radius through long-rang control of a pile of material using a core. A core is an automatic reservoir holding mana. It will gradually releasing the stored power correspondently to the power consumption of any of the programmed tasks the user set beforehand. The main method for programming is thinking, literally. As you can use your will to engrave your wish onto mana, the easiest method is to think about the tasks you want your golem to do and fill the golem core with that mana. Another method that triumph over the previous one is the usage of runic characters. The runes will ensure better longevity and allow for basic autonomous functions in addition to allowing multiple people to affect a golem. One example of the first type of programming is our dear headmistress' golems patrolling the Academy's ground. The latter being those that make consumers' products in factories or processing plants.
Luckily for you, the lessons for runes in core-making are at the beginning of the first-year second semester and not now. Now we are going to go into the first step of helping you guys study better: measurements. Flip to the last two pages, read it for around five minutes and let me prepare something."
After finishing giving the task, Alene runs outside to do something related to the lessons. The once quiet class now is mostly filled with reading students and Simon joins these students. He is reading about the basic methodology for measuring and the concept of error range and the math behind it. The instructions are simple enough and the math is basic arithmancy explained using three real-life examples. He begins to pick his book and calculate the examples for fun using the given data sets. There are 10 questions and he has completed 4 when the door of the class is opened again. Then a group of several golems enter the classroom with Alene following right behind.
" As you can see here, I have brought with me your test subjects. My task for you is simple, collect the data from these boys and bring me the values you get from them. Here, take these papers and group up with two of your neighbors, the deadline is quite tight this time around, cieca 30 minutes, Go!."
" So we are a team huh... What must we do now? Is it written on the paper?"
Joe asks, his eyes glue to a small golem standing in front of the three, its height reaching his waist. Elanor and Simon both takes a look at the paper, the former looking back at the golem. In his perspective, Simon can ... intuitively see the correct figures up to the third decimal place. The data only consists of height, width and length of the thing. Maybe because he is only seeing the golem through his eyes but he is only getting these information.
" So we need to collect data for the mass, the height, the ambient power and the hardness of the material. The tools are in a box under our table... Simon, can you please pick it up?"
"Sure thing, just give me a minute."
He crounches down and then sit back up, in his left hand a red toolbox with a bit of rust at the connecting steel joints. His eyes looking at the red number on top of the box, '3.153 kg', he opens it up before taking out a flexible ruler often seen in tailors, a disk floating 3 cm off the ground beneath it, a rectangular box with a piece of paper sticks on it with writing 'Energy gauge' and a hammer with a small blue screen attached in the handle. They have all learnt basic math and physics so the process is straightforward.
" Hey, can you get onto the desk?"
The golem shakes its head at Joe's request. Its glowing yellow eye shows such disappointment for its inability that the three do not dare to ask more from it.
" Fine, Elanor, give me the measuring tape and hold one end for me. You will be in charge of helping me and reading the numbers. Then we will use the scale and the remaining devices. Simon will write down onto papers and we will do the math together. "
With that basic categorization of labor, the group quickly take the figures and put them into seperate lists. 10 minutes have passed and most of the time they need to redo due to someone messing up but at the end of it all, ten data points for calculating for each requirement are collected. Then the three bunch up together to do the math. Simon knows the result was correct as he can see the figures through his eyes.
Both Joe and Elanor are triple checking when the result paper on the desk is suddenly picked up and brought toward the instructor.
"Sorry, let me through."
Five students are walking from the back to the front to collect everything. The first experiment is then followed by two more with lessons in between pertaining to basic statistics and unit conversions. Joe and Eleanor deal with the math for the second quiz while Simon takes on the job of writing a functionable report.
The class soon reaches its end with a sudden assignment after two hours of runtime.
" Now we are going to do something that will decide your final examination. In the tradition and spirit of Magic Engineering, you lot will have to group up and complete a project. We will be teaching you the basics but further implementations and tertiary knowledge will be researched on your own. Any questions about why so soon can be answered if you read the mottos of the Department. One of that is to delve into the unknow and make something.
Now back to the topic. I recommend a group of two to four and each students will receive a paper letting a group sign up. On it there will be fields you need to fill in like the group's members, the project's content, the reasonings behind that and a basic plan to finish it up. To write a plan, I recommend you borrowing the seniors' works to see how they have planned out preliminarily. Next class I will take back the paper and remember one thing, the final test will be around 40% of the end-of-semester evaluation. "
Finishing all that in a single breath, Alene quickly jogs out of the classroom to tackle her responsibility as an advisor. A scream, despite how girly or childish as it is, can be heard from outside a an apology can be heard.
"So are the three of us a group? Yawn..."
Joe asks, his eyes on the verge of shutting themselves down. His energy level has reached its lowest point and he as about to die peacefully for a few minutes. Eleanor is already shaking Joe slightly as an attempt to keep the boy's awake.
"Fine. So are we meeting somewhere to discuss the group's goal? We still have some time before I must meet up with my friend."
"The library. Aside from knowledge near us, air conditioning. Go before I drop from tiredness. "
" Eleanor, is this really how this guy is usually?"
"Not really...after all-nighters will he become like this."
"Well, let us get going then, Joe and Eleanor."