You’re almost there!  Congrats on making it all the way here.  Pat yourself on the back for learning how to make good videos, do better documentation, take cut-n-paste coding to a new level and oh yes, did we mention, do a project?  This is computing in the real-world, right here, right now.  Oh yeah!

Yes, we know you still have so many features and refinements to do (and we hope you will do them), but it’s now time to set things aside and make sure you have all of your current work documented for your peers to review this coming week.  Yes, we also know you are doing so many other projects as the summer is coming to an end soon.

After the scramble to make all of your documentation by the 25th, in the week ahead, you will be judging the final outcome of your peers’ projects too.  Importantly, we need you to turn in your peer evaluations on time.  We need these evaluations on time, as we need to wrap up the Orbital grading, so as to meet the deadlines for assigning the 4 S/U credits for the course (CP3108B).

Look to the “Preview Forms” section in Skylab for the Evaluation 3 milestone criteria for which your project will be graded by.  In the week following your peer review, do keep in mind you will have to do one final evaluation of your peers’ reviews on your project, so that you can give credit and thanks to all of those reviews that were helpful (including your own advisors and mentors).

Good luck!  Stay strong — you’ve come all this way.  Give each other the encouragement to stay the course!  There’s only Splashdown to go!

P/S – speaking of Splashdown, Splashdown’s date is likely changing to the 24th of Aug (1 week later) due to conflicts with other School events.  That’s one more week to polish your marketing drive, video and demos (While your project is graded by the state it is in at Milestone 3, you can tell the staff through your advisor that you have made significant progress since Milestone 3, and that we should re-evaluate your project during Splashdown.

P/P/S – Thinking of withdrawing from Orbital?  For 80% of teams that dropped in previous cohorts, this is the time where you are severely tested for time.  We advise that you try your best to stay the course and finish — you get loads of self-confidence and Orbital chops for completing.  However, if you cannot manage it, please inform us — both via your advisor and directly to Orbital in Slack.  We need all members of your group to write in, so that we’re sure that all members assent to the withdrawal.

This year’s valedictorian Yap Zi Xuan from our School of Computing mentioned Orbital as a pivotal moment in her SoC tenure.

“When I first matriculated, I had the intention of joining a financial or consulting firm upon graduation as the pay tends to be lucrative in these companies,” said Ms Yap, 23.

“That held true until our first summer vacation, when the Orbital Programme was introduced for freshmen.”

The Orbital Programme requires students to initiate their own projects and work independently. Ms Yap said it fuelled her interest in user experience design and web development.

“As I made a drastic change in my career choices from then on, I became thankful for the abundance of career opportunities offered by a computing degree,” she added.

Read the full story here: http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/nus-president-urges-computing-graduates-to-embrace-lifelong-learning-for-future-success

Dear all:

After a short hiatus, Skylab is back and ready to take your evaluations of your peer teams.  Due to the downtime, you now have until 8 Jun 23:55 to complete your peer evaluations.

Save often and keep a back up of your work!  Please report all bugs to the #skylab channel or in the Git issue tracker (on the right part of the footer at the bottom of every Skylab page), and we’ll attend to it as soon as we can.

For those of you that have signed up for Orbital and do not yet have partners, no worries!

We have this event specially scheduled for you, to help you find a prospective teammate.

Wednesday (20 April) 16:30–17:30 at the newest, coolest NUS Enterprise space: The Hangar (I3 Building; Level 1; 21 Heng Mui Keng Terrace, opposite Sheares and Kent Ridge Halls)

During this event, we’ll be having some catered light snacks and we will be provisioning you with the list of other invited students (very soon) that have similar interests to you.

Be sure to let us know whether you’re coming or not (for catering counts!) by replying to this email or by shouting out to everyone on our #findacopilot Slack channel (didn’t you add yourself already to our class’ Slack?)

Update: The event is over !  Thanks to all of you who’ve stopped by and had a cookie or a sub or a drink or all three!  Those who are still seeking partners, fret not.  There is still time to find a partner (via Slack’s #findacopilot, and during Liftoff itself).

Pics from the Hangar.  Thanks NUS Enterprise for the space!

Congratulations to all of the 137 Orbitee teams for completing the programme!  You’re the big winners in forming your own projects and navigating through all the summer hazards to finish your projects.  No doubt that you had wanted to call it quits at some point and wanted to have someone to help guide you a bit more closely.  But you persevered, insisted that you would stay the course, and won the battle against yourself.  You realised the only barrier to your progress was yourself and the fuel was your self-ignited passion.  You return from your summer journey changed, more confident of your own abilities and clear about how you can find your path forward in any technical scenario.

Splashdown featured a number of ways that you can take your work in Orbital forward, which both SoC (through our Entrepreneurship division) and the University (NUS Enterprise, especially NUS Overseas Colleges) have paved for you.  Do weigh these opportunities and assess whether they are appropriate for you.

And now for the formal awards:

• Congratulations to Flying Banana’s Juliana Seng and Renfred Choo for receiving the public’s Best Vostok Project Award, which comes with a trip to the insides of Google SG HQ and an exclusive Google insiders programme to be revealed later!
• Congratulations to Threemoji’s Yong Yoong Jie John and Sebastian Quek for receiving the public’s Best Project Gemini Award (duking it out with 68 other teams), which comes with a trip to the insides of Google SG HQ and an exclusive Google insiders programme to be revealed later!

And finally …

• Congratulations to Rocky Chicks’ Lim Ta Eu and Tay Jie Hao for receiving the public’s Best Apollo 11 Award, which comes with a trip to the insides of Google SG HQ and an exclusive Google insiders programme to be revealed later! They’ll be a force to be reckoned with!

Although you are the stars of Orbital (yes, you are!), there’s a whole host of SoC staff, alumni and senior students and groups that make this happen.  This programme does not happen anywhere else in the whole currently, so be proud that you are here in NUS SoC.  Go SoC!

This is our last post from 2015 by the Orbital-Bot so we’ll be seeing you around the school.  Signing off!

– Orbital Staff.

P.S. > If you find yourself wondering how you can contribute back to Orbital, you’ll have a way soon!  We’ll be calling for interviews for 2016 advisors and tutors at the beginning of Sem II, so reserve some time for it in your 2016 summer.  It’s ok if you are overseas and we draw students from all levels of Orbital, so just apply already!

Swift is a new general-purpose compiled programming language developed by Apple. Described as “Objective-C without the C”, it aims to do away with some of the legacy drawbacks of using C as a basis for a modern programming language.

We invite Orbitees and the general public to learn about this new programming language’s basic differences, through experimenting in the Swift 2 playgrounds. An introductory level of knowledge of various programming languages will be assumed. To fully benefit from the hands-on part of this workshop, you will need to have an Apple Developer account and have Xcode (beta) installed on your computer.

Note that this presentation will be a pre-recorded video due to the presenter’s overseas travel. Presented by Min, NUS Orbital Staff.

[Hope you had a great time with our Mission Control sessions so far!  Support your Orbital alumni and learn and network with them!]

Join us for our first mission control session at Blk 71 (the startup haven next to NUS across the AYE) next Tuesday evening.  We hope to host many of your who are local to SG this summer at this nice venue outside of SoC.

Savin (Orbital alumn and tutor) will be giving this beginning level tutorial / workshop, and like the other MC session will feature approximate one hour of tutorial and hands-on, followed by time on your own to work with your partners on your Orbital project.

jQuery is a concise and fast JavaScript library that can be used to simplify event handling, HTML document traversing, Ajax interactions and animation for speedy website development. jQuery simplifies the HTML’s client-side scripting, thus simplifying Web 2.0 applications development.

This introduction is open to the public and will feature a hands-on exercise using jQuery.

Presenter: Savin Varshney, NUS
Date: Wednesday, 3 Jun 2015
Time: 18.00 – 21.00

Whoa! We have a record-breaking 300+ students who are of part of Orbital this coming summer!
Due to the overwhelming demand we are closing registration for Orbital to non-SoC students and students not recommended by NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC) to join.  Fret not if you are already “in” (read: in the Slack team) and from another faculty or from NUS High, you’re already part of our big big family!

See you all soon!