Friday, July 25, 2008

Settling down&DEEP

I've been here in Canada for 9 days now(those back in Taiwan who miss me, keep on doing that,HAHA! Just kidding!) and I think that I've been adjusting to the life here quite well, but my English will still need A LOT of improvements(which is ok,since I've left the States for almost 10 years).


I've been gong to the DEEP(da Vinci Engineering Enrichment Program http://www.ecf.utoronto.ca/apsc/html/deep/) summer camp,it's like a camp that teaches all kind of elements of engineering(it's called an Engineering Enrichment Program),and I took the J-ROB-3 Robotics: Mind, Body & Senses! course.


The first two days aren't quite worth mentioning, we learned about a program called MATLAB(wikipedia-it if you wanna know more), it wasn't awful but still when the instructor said that we wouldn't have to use it on the day we sorta went "Ya!" "Finally!" and things like that(that should give you an idea of what was going on). On the third day we tested out Quake 3 bots(wikipedia-it)(under the instructor's orders :)) and built the LEGO NXT(wikipedia-it) robot

which was quite fun though I have one at home(in Taipei......) We had a competition the next day,the video's too big so I can't upload it.
And on the last day of the week,today, we went to a kids rehab center and saw some neat things, like some basic mind-reading, playing a mini-golf game by pursing your lip etc. Just contraptions that can help people who are disabled in one way or another. It was quite interesting to see how the cutting edged tech could be used to help different kinds of people, but I really feel sorry for those kids, it's such a pain to see someone your age who has to have help from others to do anything.
Anyway, I'll be in another week of DEEP in which we make Battlebots(like robots that can battle each other), it sound interesting and I'm looking forward to it.
I'll write again if there's more to write about.

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