IT Seminar - Day 1 - Switzerland
The 2023 International IT Seminar kicked off on the 11th of April with the Swiss day.
Morning workshop - DTA
We were first up with our workshop in the morning. Our aim was to help the other students program and control a small DIY buggy via a bluetooth using a Flutter app. Our workshop consisted of 2 main parts :
- Programming the RaspberryPi onboard the buggy
- Filling in the controls part of the Flutter app
Students working on our workshop
For more information about the project, feel free to browse my post dedicated to it. The workshop was a great learning experience on how risk management and adaptability. Indeed, 30 minutes before the start of the workshop, we learned that none of the students had gotten our request to install the necessary software to develop with Flutter. Consequentially we decided to make them install all the required components at the start, but set a time limit after which we would loan our own personal computers to the students who didn’t manage to install everything. We had also prepared a preconfigured VM students could use to develop with. This way we were sure that development would start after 11h00.
While mingling with one of the groups I learned that most students had little to no experience with programming, an information that had not been shared by the organisers. To address this new information, we reacted quickly with my colleague Joanna by modifying our project so that even inexperienced students would be able to try and fill in the missing code snippets to make the app work.
We also had a problem with the building’s Wi-Fi who decided to give up on 30 people all trying to connect to it at the same time. Luckily we managed to find a colleague of one of the teachers who setup a new router and access point for the students.
Even though we faced some tough challenges I can say the workshop turned out to be a success. Several teams managed to make their robots work, many students from completely different backgrounds, schools and countries worked together to face the challenge we gave them. And most of all they had fun and started creating bonds that would only tighten as the week went on!
Here you can see the final demo of our buggy at the end of the workshop :
Afternoon workshop - Filière classique
Our compatriots had prepared a workshop around Augmented Reality and started off with an interesting presentation explaining how AR and VR technologies work. After that we were split into two groups who would alternate after a period of time.
The first group tested out a few AR and VR experiences. In VR we used the Oculus Quest 2 to walk on a plank atop a skyscraper and to fly around a city using rockets tied to our virtual fists. In AR we used a mixed reality headset that would track your hand movements and let you use them to solve puzzles in a virtual world.
The second group was tasked with creating a simple AR application using Unity and Vuforia to scan an image and render a small virtual object on top of said image.
Unity screenshot of cube on bird picture
Result of project deployed on a phone