Urban League Summer Camp: Day 4

Well it's after 9PM and I'm still at CIS.... YIKES. Don't you ever question my dedication to this job.

Okay, threats aside... Why am I so busy, anyways? Today was the second-to-last day for my portion of the Urban League Summer Camp 2012, which means that tomorrow is presentation day, so I've been busy getting everything ready for the kids to assemble tomorrow. It may sound like I'm doing all the work but I promise I'm not... Let's rewind and start over from the beginning of today.

We started out with looking at all of the anaglyphs that were created yesterday. We decided which ones looked good and which didn't seem to work, and what some of the causes for them not to look good might be. More often than not, the red and cyan pictures were too far apart from one another, so we weren't able to resolve them into a single image without giving ourselves headaches. I showed the flower example, and at first everyone thought it looked good - until I pointed out that the flowers in front perspective-wise were actually showing as in the back depth-wise. One sharp student noticed that if you switched the 3-D glasses (so, left eye looks out cyan instead of red), it seemed  to correct itself. Huzzah! I then showed the corrected image I made, where I fixed the left/right red/cyan perspectives, which garnered many oohs and aahs. Yeah, that was pretty cool.

Before we knew it, Nadya had arrived to give her presentation and demo on LiDAR (in keeping with the 3-D theme). She presented on her summer research measuring plants grown under differing soil/compost/worm power conditions and described how LiDAR works and what it's used for. Jan also went over the concepts of reflectivity curves briefly, and how the LiDAR system uses near-IR laser pulses to measure the distances of objects 360º around it. Then, the group from DIRS gave a demo with the LiDAR system:

 

After a little processing, we had a chance to view the 3-D point cloud that was measured:

Whoa! It was super cool to be able to enter through the point cloud door and move around through the entire room, including looking up at the ceiling and up into the recessed lights. The detail on the faces of the kids in the front was really amazing, too. Needless to say, this really got their attention, and we had so much fun with the first one that we did a second scan (this time with the lights off, so that we could try recording in digital cameras to see whether the CCDs would be able to detect the laser):

This time there were some technical difficulties getting the data processed, so in the mean time I was able to revisit the 3-D analgyphs and show the kids the two that have just been received from the new Mars Rover, Curiosity. It was really cool to see how actually relevant data and exercises like that are, and let's be honest, anything involving the Mars rovers is always awesome. I was happy to hear that pretty much all the kids were following the news of Curiosity (even with the Olympics going on, YES!), but some of them were not convinced that it was really on Mars - so I went through a few slides of one of my normal presentations about the "Mars blueberries" and how spectral sensing can be used to identify materials on the surfaces of other planets. The talk really held the kids' attention, too, which just goes to show how cool Mars is.

The end of my little tangent talk coincided perfectly with the data processing wrapping up, so then we had a chance to look at the second LiDAR point cloud:

And with that we gave Nadya et al a big round of applause and many thanks for showing us all their cool technologies. The LiDAR definitely went over really well!

After that we didn't have a whole lot of time left to get started on planning for tomorrow's presentation, so it was really time to hustle. I explained what the plan was for tomorrow: we'll have about an hour to prepare, and then will start the presentation around 1:45. I also made it clear that I will NOT be the one giving the presentation - after all, I've been doing all the work all week! This time it will be their turn. After some initial chaos, I was proud to see things naturally settle and start progressing with minimal suggestion from me. A few natural leaders stepped up: one student asked right away if she could be emcee tomorrow because she knows she's good at it, which I thought was an excellent idea; and two others were eager to help organize into groups and take control of the whiteboard. Everyone decided they wanted to divide up according to the days of the week, so there would be 4 groups (to represent Monday - Thursday). Once the groups were determined, they had about 10 minutes to strategize about how they wanted to proceed with the presentation. I promised to have the truths/misconceptions video clips assembled for tomorrow, and also reminded everyone that I had pictures and videos from all of the days to help support their presentations. The groups got right down to business with planning, my role being facilitator. 

With a few minutes left in the session, I asked the leader from each of the groups to share with everyone what their plan is:

• Monday's group plans to first ask the audience: "What is Imaging Science?" This will be followed by my video, after which they will explain what Imaging Science is and use the platypus as an example. 
• Tuesday's group is planning to explain much of the theory behind 3-D head scanners and how they work, and will show videos of themselves getting scanned. 
• Wednesday's group is going to do a demo where they will create an anaglyph in real time (what a great idea!!!!), and then will go through the existing images and also explain the example of the flowers. 
• Thursday's group plans to show the Mars images and describe all the LiDAR excitement from today, using the videos above. 

I know at least one of the groups said they might throw a rap in there too for fun, which would be awesome. I think these are all really good ideas - I am excited to see it all come together tomorrow! I am really proud of this group and confident that they will pull off a fantastic presentation. They did a wonderful job today - I admit, I will miss them next week...

And that brings me to where I am now - almost 10PM, holy cow! I spent hours getting the video all made (which if you recall, the slides and format for the video were chosen by the kids on Tuesday), and then got started on the Powerpoint slides that were requested by each of the groups while the video exported. And then I wrote this blog post, which you can guess took a while. I really wish I could post the video I made here - it is hilarious (sound effects FTW), but like I said the other day, a bunch of people didn't want to be online, so I shall respect their wishes. Anyways it really is too late, so I am getting out of here. I predicted this morning that I would be there until 10PM, but I didn't really expect to be so accurate...