Taking it to the streets

I mentioned a few months ago that I was leading an outreach "task force" to put together a 50 minute show about engineering for secondary schools in the ACT (and possibly further afield). Well, we are now approaching the end of the preperation time, and the start of the live performances, which is a little scary to say the least. We did our first live performance (in front of science communication experts) about 2 weeks ago (the day before I flew off to China), and much to my relief, we received some very possitive feedback. We are a team of three PhD students, and one undergrad, which is quite small compared with the other two teams. We are also the only team completely comprising of students, so I am pretty happy with what we have produced so far.

Our "show" is centred around robot vision, or in other words, how do we get robots to see, and then act. This made the most sense because all three of us PhD students are involved in robot vision projects. I have also managed to sneek a fair bit of honeybee content in as well, because the videos are too cool to leave out.

We hit the road in about 4 weeks, and do a whole bunch of school appearances up until School finishes in December. It may well continue on next year as well, although I probably won't be around to do much.

I am pretty happy with how things have turned out with this, because it has not been without stress. Trying to come up with an entertaining 50 minute show with genuine content (i.e not just a show and tell of robot videos), as well as interactive activities has really been quite difficult, and has undergone many iterations over the last 3 months. Ultimately, I just hope the kids don't boo us off stage.