In the last five weeks since I began this project in earnest (the vast majority of which I spent cooped up at home due to quarantine), I have accomplished quite a lot! In this post, I will discuss what I have accomplished so far, a change in project scope, takeaways from the various technologies I have worked with, and the next milestones for the project. The code for this project can be found at my GitHub here.

I am spending the five weeks of March Term and Spring Break working on this, with plans to continue this project in the summer.

I have less than a week left in Australia, and it has been a blast! Because I have been taking year 10 classes but Patrick is in year 11, I have been able to make friends with people from both grades. Overall, everyone has been really friendly to talk to. I’ve finally gotten a lot of names down, and have enjoyed talking to friends about all of the differences between Australian and American slang, culture, and politics. Through these conversations, I have also continued to notice a number of differences between here and America.

I just arrived in Adelaide on Sunday, and it’s felt like a whole new world out here. Right out of the airport gate, I was surprised to discover Angela (Patrick’s mom) and Julia Chukwani (the exchange coordinator) waiting for me. They didn’t have to wait outside of the airport: in Australia, anyone can come straight up to the gate! When I left the airport, I made my next blunder: getting into the right side of the car, until I realized that there was a steering wheel in front of me. Then, of course, was the adjustment period for driving on the left side of the road rather than the right. Although this was not my first time in a country that drives on the left, (e.g. England, India), it was still something I was not readily used to. I also needed to acclimate myself to the sudden change in season, and consequently the weather. Instead of the sun setting at almost 9pm, it set at just after 5, and the weather was cold and rainy (very different from the burning Australia weather I had imagined). But at the same time, it was nice to be away from the burning California sun, or even worse, their own summer weather, which apparently goes up to 110˚ (or 45˚ C, another of the units which I was not used to).

In the past few days, I have had the opportunity to interview three candidates for our school’s new position as the Director of the Carter Innovation Studio. The position itself is a very fluid one: at a minimum their job will involve managing the administrative duties of running a facility such as the CIS, but the goal is that the director will be an active member of the community in bringing science and engineering to the forefront of our school’s priorities, and have outside connections to help facilitate such change. A candidate may teach Applied Science or a technical task, they may help out with our robotics team, continue the school’s stagnated airplane project, or begin a new Uniquely Athenian program involving the CIS.

Today was my first day at Positronics, a robotics software company, and I will be working here for the next three and a half weeks for our school’s inaugural March Term.

Last weekend, Donovan and I flew down to San Diego to help run Robolink’s Maker Faire booth there. For the last month, we worked to get our Machine Learning demo working. Our goal was to get the Zumi to be able to distinguish between a coke can and an apple and react accordingly by driving either forwards or backwards. An added constraint was that the model would have to be small enough to run quickly on a Raspberry Pi Zero, a computer that has less than 0.5 GB of RAM and a very small CPU.