Gobble Gobble

So, I haven't been around too much for the past few days; and no, it's not because of Fall Break. I've been sick! This has been the first time since I started here at RIT two years ago that I've had a cold - which is actually unprecedentedly long for me. Unfortunately it coincided with Thanksgiving, boo! Thankfully I was able to enjoy my turkey dinner, but the days leading up to and following have been pretty miserable. Anyways, I'm not here to complain, just wanted to explain my absence as of late; and, more importantly, to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving! I hope that everyone enjoyed a wonderful celebration of generosity and of what was almost our national bird if Ben Franklin had had his way (and I'm inclined to agree).

Isn't he beautiful? I'm glad the ones we buy at Wegmans don't look like that, or else I'd be forced to enjoy tofurkey.

And now, the epic conclusion.

Remember how I predicted there would be a few bumps along the way? Yeah...

So before we got started, I hadn't received confirmation on whether tools had been acquired... So I was pretty nervous that we weren't going to be able to proceed. As I waited for all 5 of the classrooms to sign in to the webinar, I chatted with the teachers already present...

  (cue initial panic that the activity may have to be postponed)

  Ms. Kelly's Class: So we are not going to do it today?

  Bethany: It depends -

  Ms. Kelly's Class: We have our cameras and our students ready

  Bethany: Whether we can proceed depends upon whether you have all been set up with all of the tools necessary to open up the cameras

  Ms. Kelly's Class: ...and a tool to open the cameras..Is there anything else we need?

  Bethany: Oh!

PHEW! We then confirmed what the tools were and that they were appropriate (one teacher's chat of, "I have 2 flat heads on my desk. Was wondering what they were for." was my favorite part of this discussion); and then after experiencing some unfortunate time-eating technical difficulties with the webcams, we were able to get underway! Hooray! 

So after going through a 10 minute or so discussion about different types of cameras, what they are used for, and what they all have in common, we moved into the camera disassembly activity. (Any of you loyal blog followers may remember camera disassembly from the Urban League Summer Camp kids.) This was a bit difficult logistically, as there were 5 classrooms of varying sizes, and because of the technical difficulties experienced earlier with the webcams I could not see the classrooms to see how far along they were following my directions. We therefore had to communicate via the chat window so I would know when to go ahead. Some of the bigger classes had to ask to slow down... so while we all waited for them to catch up, I felt kind of awkward just sitting here staring at a webcam, with no idea what was going on at the other end. I started making silly faces, which apparently went over really well, because I started getting requests to do it again. So, I think I handled the slightly-less-than-ideal situation well enough and was still able to keep the kids entertained during the slow parts.

As usual, the big spark and pop from discharging the capacitor was a huge hit - the chat window started blowing up with, "They are loving this!!", "Wow!", and, "How fun!". I only wish we could have had all the webcams going, because that is my favorite part to watch!

As the activity wrapped up, each of the classrooms came back on their webcams and of the students stood up and cheered! I tried to grab a screen shot of this, though I was a little bit late in getting it so some of the classrooms were already taking down their webcams (and the ones who were still cheering were all blurry in their extreme excitement):

Pay no attention to the goofiness of the powerpoint slide. That was the only one that the formatting got messed up on, I swear.

So that barely represents the huge reaction I got... Perhaps it is better summed up by the chat window:

  karam:Thank you so much!!  We really enjoyed this!
  Heather:Thank You!!!!
  Ms. Kelly's Class:Thank you!
  Perra:Thank you!!!
  Perra:Very exciting!

Or, by the conversation I had afterward with the guy whose office is adjacent to mine, who thought I was watching Sesame Street because there was like 2 minutes straight of children loudly cheering which was clearly audible in his office (and we both had our doors closed).

All in all, the activity went really well overall and was a lot of fun. Even though there were technical difficulties, there was a lot to learn from those and I would expect things to go much cleaner next time. (And, I'd remember to send tools ahead of time...) The excited reaction of the kids at the end made it all worth it!

Aaaaaand... Scene! Until next season, THE END.

It's November Sweeps time, so here's my own cliffhanger.

Today I will be trying something that I've never done before: an online webinar. Although it's been done by other folks in CIS before, this is my first time moderating and presenting on my own, and it is also a first for my audience on the other end. So I expect a few bumps along the way... But that makes for an exciting story, right? Anyways, in the interest of not having one big long blog post, I'm going to break this up into parts (hence why I'm starting before I've even done the activity yet).

My audience is a group of 4th and 5th grade classrooms (five in total, of 15-20 students each) at the Martin Luther King Elementary School in Utica, NY. I have visited this school for the past two years, but this year it was not feasible to make the trek so instead we decided to do something remotely. This also posed the advantage that it would be a new presentation and activity for the students, as last year we did high speed video and the year before we did thermal imaging. So, this time around I will present all about cameras and then lead the students through a step-by-step camera disassembly activity.

I ordered and sent out the one-time-use cameras ahead of time, and also did a dry run of connecting with the school via the Adobe Connect webinar software a couple days ago. So, everything seemed to be in order - until last night as I was brushing my teeth before bed, I realized I had overlooked something very important - TOOLS! It seems obvious now how important they are, but in the whole scheme of organizing and ordering things, it was very easy to overlook the actual tools needed to do the disassembly. (In my defense, this was my first time organizing this activity remotely, but others who have done it remotely before had it slip their minds too - so, I'm not alone. Really!) And so came the frantic 11PM e-mail to the school principal, which also led into frantic phone calls this morning. As of yet, I'm not sure whether we might have to reschedule.

So for now, CLIFFHANGER: Will the tools get acquired on time??!? Will we be able to go forward as planned?! Find out in our next installment. (I know you're on the edge of your seats.) (Well, I actually am.)

Connections

Today Joe and I gave an overview of Imaging Science and tour of the building and labs to a group of Undergraduate Admissions counselors. It all went very well, and they told us it was very informative. In fact, a couple of them said they wished they had known more about us before they went out on their recruiting trips. So maybe it came a little late, but at least now they know more about us! It is always great to make positive connections with other people, because you never know when they might know someone who would be interested in Imaging Science in some capacity. In fact, one of the counselors has a background in geology - so she connected with MVRL on account of their geological eye tracking research!

Emphasis on the "M"

So yesterday I coordinated the visit of an undergraduate class from the Department of Communications here at RIT who wanted to learn more about eye tracking. Basically I set up a presentation and demo in the Fishbowl (Carlson Learning Center) downstairs, with Karen of MVRL (The Multidisciplinary Vision Research Lab) doing the actual presenting. The class was really interested in how eye tracking works, and the best part was when the students started brainstorming how they could use such technology in their communications research. That's one of the things that's so cool about MVRL: its multidisciplinary aspects. There are so many different people from such different academic backgrounds that all have an interest in being there and advancing the technology and applications of eye tracking and visual perception research. Pretty awesome, huh?

Meanwhile, the whole way this demo came about was kind of interesting. There was one day this quarter for the class I'm taking that my professor wasn't going to be there, so he had another professor lead the class that night. Us students went around the room and introduced ourselves, and I mentioned working in the Center for Imaging Science (and included the usual disclaimer that we are not the same as photography). The substitute professor then mentioned that she had actually been trying to get in touch with someone from the eye tracking lab about getting a tour for her undergraduate class, but she hadn't heard back. Once I got over the shock of having an unrelated person actually understand what Imaging Science is (all my hard work is paying off!!!), I told her I could help, and... well you can guess the rest. Okay so I guess that doesn't sound all that exciting, but I always think it's cool when random connections come up in unexpected environments. (And I feel like I'm getting to be one of those people that knows tons of different people from a wide variety of areas on campus, which is awesome!)

"I won't hit any of those pins." "Not with THAT attitude!"

One of the best things about the Center for Imaging Science at RIT is all the fun and free stuff we provide our students. I took full advantage of this when I was a student here myself - weekly IS&T meetings with pizza, the Winter Games, the Hunt, treats on holidays, copious amounts of t-shirts, etc. Since then the list of benefits has expanded to include outings such as dinner, laser tag, bowling - ask, and ye shall receive. Which is just what our second year students did, so last night CIS hosted a dinner and bowling outing for them!

Since the bowling lanes had leagues until 9PM, we started the evening with dinner at Tully's. Almost all of the second year students made it out, and then there were three adults (Joe, myself, and my fellow CIS-alum husband) to later serve as team captains for bowling. Since this was a pretty large group, we had to wait a bit for tables - but, we found ways to pass the time.

And then we experienced some of Tully's namesake "Good Times".

And stuffed ourselves with noms.

While we waited for the check, Joe, Matt, and I pulled names from a hat to make our initial bowling teams. Since the first letters of the names of the people on my team spelled "S-K-A-B", we decided to be Team SKABz. Matt's team named themselves Team MATTLAB, and I have no idea whether Joe's team even had a name or not. Then with pretty much perfect timing, we headed down the street to Bowl-A-Roll.

There were 12 of us and they gave us 3 lanes, which was perfect! 4 on a lane made for really well paced games, and since we had three adjacent lanes there was always something entertaining going on.

Each game we re-pulled names from a hat to get different teams and mix things up. (But we still kept the ridiculous nick names chosen for the players, such as "Cheezekurt", "Hamburger", and "A1 Steak Sauce", "Gonads", etc...)

Epic 10th frame.

Best bowl of the night - I scored a spare on a split, YEAH!

So many funny highlights happened that we decided to get plates from the snack bar and do paper plate awards, including: Best Muppet Freakout award; "Wha' Happen?" (so many 0's) award; Straight Shooter award; Best Curves award; Hottest Granny (for granny-style bowling) award; and the coveted, "It's 11 o'clock and I'm out of time" award; among others. I won the Future "So You Think You Can Dance" Winner award, for the spontaneous loosey goosey dance that made an appearance several times...

There may or may not be a video of this somewhere...

The event overall ended up being so much fun, and it really gave us all an opportunity to get to know each other better outside the stress of classes and work. It also gave CIS a chance to show our students how much we appreciate them and want them to succeed not only professionally but personally, as well. I definitely look forward to having more of these outings in the future - our students are the best! (Speaking of which, have I ever mentioned that I have the best job ever?)

You can view all of the pictures from the night here.

If you don't get it, google "nyan cat"

This has happened.