Elementary bots, Tas-Silg, and Bocci Boulders

Last night our third professor (Chris Clark) landed, and he and I prepared for our presentations at St. Edward's College (a primary and secondary private school). This morning, a bunch of us went out running, and came back just in time to leave for the school. When we arrived, we set up all of the binary encoder robots that we presented at Pacheco during winter quarter at Cal Poly, and watched in awe as WAY more kids filed in than we had previously expected. We still managed pretty well. Our audience consisted of ~65 3rd and 4th graders.




Chris started off by giving a talk on how robots work, why they are important, and how they can be used to beneficially. I got up and gave a short explanation on how to program the bots that the kids would be fiddling around with, and then we split up into groups. We all had a great time, and the kids were ecstatic to get to work with robots. We packed up and took off from St. Edwards at about 10:30, and headed straight for our site: Tas-Silg.

Tas-Silg is an ancient temple site located on the south-western side of the island by the coast. We set up the control boxes and robot, and deployed into our first cistern. This was BY FAR the coolest cistern that we have done on this trip so far. There were a bunch of twisty, rubble filled passages, and the water was crystal clear (although I still would not drink from it).


After 15 minutes of driving in the cistern, Timmy (our awesome host) showed up to give us a tour of the grounds. David Cardona, a graduate student at University of Malta also showed up to check in with us. A little later, Prof. Simon Fabri, a professor at University of Malta, showed up with two of his students who were doing similar robotics work. Brent and I gave them a tour of our equipment and setup, and then asked them a couple of questions on our research topics for our global engineering class. Once that was done, Tim and I set up the go-pros on the ROV, and deployed to get some textures from the first cistern. We hoisted the ROV up and deployed into the second cistern (located 20m away from the first). We finished up at about 3:00, and called the bus driver.



It turns out that the bus driver wasn't going to be able to get there until 4:15, and Zoe had to give a talk at the university at 4:00. Timmy & Simon took Zoe, Jane, Chris, Brent, and Jeff in their cars. The rest of us stayed with the equipment on site until the bus driver showed up. Since we had an hour to kill, we decided to play an awesome game that we call bocci boulders (similar to bocci ball.... but... with boulders). Tim was surprisingly good, and won nearly every round except for the rounds where a car ran over his boulder and smashed it into pieces.


The driver finally showed up and we hopped in. The drive home was relaxing, and I spent a lot of time thinking about how much I am going to miss this trip. It has been such a great experience, and it's really too bad that it's already halfway over! We got home, unloaded, and did some coding for our software projects. I got the mosaic for the day wrapped up and will start working on the second cistern shortly. It's been a great day, and the next week is looking similarly awesome!