Problems are important

This is the first year I've worked with the Cricket Logo microcomputer and I'm encountering some interesting problems. The crickets are actually increasing the problems quite a bit over the Mindstorms RCXs I used before so it's fortunate I'm teaching 9th grade instead of 7th. The crickets have some finicky hardware and to make things worse I've chosen to use Jackal, a finicky program, because it's the only one that provides syntax coloring for Logo. So today my class was getting the simple vehicles they had built to stay on a road course I made on white butcher paper. Four of the teams were successfully navigating the road little-by-little and three were stuck getting a single motor to turn on. So I trouble-shot with them. Here's what we did:

• send the beep command. Success? Yes
• send a, on. Success? No
• maybe the batteries are dying, not strong enough to power the motor, so change them. Success? No
• send it b, on for the second motor. Success? Yes, hah!
  
• maybe it's the actual motor, so switch it for another. Success? No
• maybe it's the wires connecting the motor to a, so switch the 9 volt adapters, try a, on Success? YES!
• try b, on. Success? No!
• So the wire or circuit board on the 9 volt adapter is bad
  

Replacing it worked and the students were happy campers. In the end, problems are good, because now I know even the 9 volt adapters can be faulty.