Timeline of Events, Science Fair (Day 2)

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, March 17th, 2008

It’s JUDGE DAY! Wooooooooooo!

4:45 AM – …And the wake up music is Bubbly by Colbie something… YAY! Well done iPod again – the random algorithm is really doing good

4:50 AM – Check results of Robbie Robot downloads … I broke the 1,000 mark!

4:57 AM – Looked and spy’ed to see what IP my computer is and where StatPress thinks it’s from – the flag is Canada, but it thinks it’s from Saudi Arabia! The ISP is correct, not sure how it gets SA! xD

5:00 AM – Watch goes off! Time to wake everyone up

5:02 AM – Time to get ready wooo wooo!

5:12 AM – Waiting for Dad :/

5:13 AM – Attempts to go downstairs… but hears a squeak and it’s too dark (even with my iPod as a flashlight)

5:40 AM – Time to get dressed

5:50 AM – Eat and drink (a bit — not really hungry)

6:10 AM – Put the bags in the car and got ready to leave!

6:15 AM – Left the house!

7:20 AM – Arrived at the school, yay

7:35-8:20 AM – Wrote log in the actual log book as opposed to my commonplace book

8:25 AM – Went into the gym and set up

1st judge – Remote control for Keynote presentation didn’t work However, judge didn’t understand anyway – I’m thinking that he’s anti-machine as he was absolutely repulsed at making friends with a computer or having a conversation with it. He didn’t speak English very well, either.

2nd judge – Rebooted my mac a few minutes before, but it was still was loading up when he was asking about my project. The remote worked though! But my ‘tardiness’ of the presentation probably lost me 10 marks, at least! In the end, he didn’t understand it.

3rd judge – A programmer! Awesome! He really liked the source code of Robbie, and how it was made on a mac. This particular judge knows C, Java and does some PHP on the side.

4th judge – I actually can’t remember this one for some reason. All I remember is that he wanted me to sit down with him, which was pretty neat! It was either this judge, or the next one, that asked me about Turing (who he was, why the test is so special, etc. etc.). He liked Robbie!

5th judge – This judge was astonished that I used Keynote. I was actually taken aback when he blurted out ‘Hey! That’s Keynote!’ I had to pull myself to get back to the conversation about conversations, instead of having a conversation about how much fun Keynote is. He really liked Robbie. At the end of it all, we were checking out iMovie to see if I could remotely fix his .AVI problem. It turns out that there’s some new encoder of .AVI’s, or something. Neat!

12:00 PM – Took a peak at some of the awards in the booklet. Only 2 people can go to ISEF. That’s pretty tricky! I really hope they choose a computer science project. Personally, I REALLY want to go as I want to be CHALLENGED! I’m eager for a challenge, difficult questions, and some computer scientists to nag me about my almost-OO code! McGill has 4*250 EE & CE prizes. They also have 2*100 CS Robotics awards. Concordia has a paloozle of awards, for instance 2*250 outstanding achievement in CS, 2*250 outstanding achievement in EE & CE, 2*250 women in engineering & CS, 2*250 faculty of engineering & CS award. Wow, so much CS from Concordia! I’m really amazed at how there is so many biology awards, it’s quite crazy. There is also the Ecole Polytech award (that I won last year). It will be nice if I win something, but I’m really not expecting anything. If I do win something, it will go towards books from amazon.com! I’d love to read more stuff!

12:30 PM (After lunch)

Profound Passerby-er #1 – This person knows Pascal AND Assembly! I was completely astonished. Assembly is like… the toughest language out there! It actually turns out that he used his Pascal program and debugger to create an Assembly code. That’s extremely neat! We talked about Java and Objecive-C, and of course Robbie. Pretty neat!

Profound Passerby-er #2 – This person is definitely the person you want to talk to your project about! Unfortunately, I was wandering around looking at other projects when he dropped by, so my Dad helped get him. I’m glad someone FINALLY asked me challenging questions! Although, they weren’t that challenging, but I actually had to think for a few milliseconds before answering some of them. (COOL!) He asked for my bibliography, which is not that impressive as I didn’t have many resources available 0_0. (The two things on there are MIT OCW, and Computer Speech Technology by Robert D. Rodman). He also asked if I could have Robbie tested with autistic children — ABSOLUTELY! I’d love to do that!

4:00 PM – Erin doesn’t understand why everyone is leaving

4:05 PM – Realizes it’s time to go home, so packed up the display and everything! I didn’t leave my logbook or report there, however. I’m extremely skeptical since last year.

6:00 PM – Home sweet home!

So, now my plan is to see if I can get my Arduino running in Xcode! Once I do, I’ll be able to port the speaking character view of robbie to it, so that say, a stuffed penguin, will be able to move its beak up and down to signify that it is speaking.

I have to get this running ASAP, if I want to live up to what I said to Profound Passerby-er #2!

Apparently, tomorrow I have to wake up at the same time. Oh well! Doesn’t matter to me, as there is no formal judging. Just the fun stuff, no stress! If a profound person asks about your project, you can just take it easy – and not worry about outlining the dry and boring Purpose, Discussion, Conclusion. On with the demos and flowcharts!

One more thing – Robbie broke 1,000 downloads this morning!

Happy St. Patty’s Day! Enjoy these pics!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.
Tags: 2008, Robbie, Robbie the Robot, science fair, St. Patrick's Day, timeline

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