Posted on March 10, 2015 by orbital

Photo credit: Jake Christensen

Tomorrow afternoon will be the one and only pre-Liftoff briefing about Orbital, for prospective students.  We hope to get you fired up about the upcoming summer programme and look forward to your questions, concerns and general discussion.

Don’t forget to visit the registration form aka “interest form” to help us convince management and our corporate sponsors (Google) that we need all the help we can get for the magnificent summer ahead!

Here’s that link: http://goo.gl/forms/5IU2EiGhoH

See you!

Posted on January 18, 2015 by orbital

Image courtesy Klaus Jakob Comes @ Flickr

Welcome to a new year!  And we are gearing up for Orbital 2015!  Yeah!

Min will be going around to the mandatory classes that freshman should be enrolled for this semester, to describe Orbital and play the featured video (in the featured post).  Spread the word and love about Orbital and we look forward to your brainy, zany and exciting ideas for your summer D-I-Y project!

Catch Min at a roadshow nearest you:

  • 13 Jan CS1010 roadshow @ I3 #03-40 (with Prof. Tan Tiow Seng)
  • 20 Jan CS1020 roadshow @ SR1 (with Mr Aaron Tan)
  • 22 Jan CS2010 roadshow @ SR1 (with Dr Ang Chuan Heng)
  • 27 Jan CS1020 roadshow @LT19 (with Dr Low Kok Lim)
  • 28 Jan CS2020 roadshow @LT15 (with a/P Seth Gilbert)

Posted on August 21, 2014 by orbital

Photo Credits: Jay Williams @ Flickr

This is it!  Tomorrow’s the big event — Splashdown — the capstone to your project!

Some tips:

– Make sure you eat a good meal tomorrow and have a water bottle for drinking.  It gets noisy with 200+ people all talking in one classroom!

– Do print out your posters early.  It will be busy tomorrow and you should try to get your posters done early.  If you do them today, you can drop them off at the “poster locker” in the Undergraduate Office (COM1 #02-19).  Ask Ms Mah Chain Yee, or Ms Nur Arifah to help you place the posters in the right area for pickup tomorrow.

– Make sure to practice your pitch and presentation, even having a way to show your off your products — small leaflets or QR codes with reminders (with project IDs) can be helpful.  Also, no one looked bad by dressing up a bit for these types of events (we will be taking pictures!  Hope you’ll put your selfies on Facebook and link them back to the Splashdown FB page — we have one, didn’t you know?).  There will be some first year students coming to Splashdown, so you can also chat with them to tell them about your lessons learned.

– You will be receiving your voter ID tomorrow either by email (most likely) or at the registration desk.  You will need to take note of this for tomorrow’s best project voting.  Keep an eye out for it.  You will need your smartphone (or stop by the registration desk) to do the voting.  Please do it to keep our event lively!   Note down the projects you think are worthy of being crowned best of Vostok, Project Gemini or Apollo 11.

– Do reciprocate that effort — take the session you’re not in to look around and to see what your other teams have been able to do.  Say “Hi” to your peer teams that you may have only known virtually and give them a boost too for this final run.

– We will be starting an alumni of Orbital page soon, and if you want your name to be captured on there (with your level of achievement), please send Min and Wee Sun a private note by Piazza or by email <kanmy@comp.nus.edu.sg>, <leews@comp.nus.edu.sg>.  If you have a LinkedIn or other social media account and would like to be endorsed for specific skills — by default it would be Google App Engine and Python — also send an invitation to us so that we can eventually (in a few weeks after Splashdown) do this for you.

That is all.  Houston, out.

Posted on August 8, 2014 by orbital

Dear Orbitees:

Congratulations on making it this far!  Hopefully you’re finishing with your evaluation of peer and adviser feedback – due 13 Aug (next Wednesday).  This step should be relatively fast and will be a key step in enabling your peers to make it to their achievement levels.

Now it’s time to start preparing for your very last milestone — Splashdown!

Splashdown is the complement to your Ignition pitch (remember that, way back in May?).  Each team will need to present what they were able to accomplish in their Orbital project.  Teams will have to prepare an A1 sized poster to describe, pitch and demonstrate their work to the audience.  The Splashdown session is broken into two separate poster sessions, held back to back, in SR1 (Seminar Room 1).  Roughly half of the teams will be presenting in the first session and half in the second session.  When your team is not presenting, it’s your chance, privilege and responsibility to go scout out the other projects and talk with your peers about their experience.  After all, you’d like to share (complain?) about how much time you wasted trying to figure out that small bug that was actually absurdly simple, so perhaps you’d like to hear your peers other stories?

Probably more importantly, you’ll need to take note of which projects you think are really good.  There will be public voting to determine the best project for each of the three levels of achievement (Vostok, Project Gemini and Apollo 11).  Public voting is done by you, your peers, any guests (you can and should invite some friends to come boost for your project) and staff.  Staff and staff guests’ votes figure a bit more in the final tally, but much of the prize determination is done by all of you!  So get ready to sell your project to guests — it’s also a chance for you to make good on your communication skills (after all it’s got a bit in common with a job interview).  We’ll be sending you a voter ID on the day of Splashdown so that you can weigh in on which teams projects are the best in class.  Google Singapore will be supplying the prizes and is subsidizing the poster printing, so please go thank them when you see them in person at Splashdown!

We hope you have had an epiphany during your summer self-study and found Computing really the right choice for you and your life path.  Perhaps you’re really fired up about your project and want to know more about how to take it further, or have an even better idea for your next project? During Splashdown, there will be a few short talks by industry guests and by the Entrepreneurship unit of our school, that are on relevant “where to go from here, life after Orbital” topics.  You should review all the information on the Splashdown page now, and one more time closer to Splashdown (as things change as they get updated).

See you soon!

Posted on August 5, 2014 by orbital

Hi all,

Another opportunity to participate in a hackathon has just been announced. I’m relaying this message on behalf of NUS Interactive and Digital Media Institute (IDMI).  If you have any questions, please contact Kelvin Tan at kelvintan@nus.edu.sg.

-Min

NUS Enterprise and SMRT present the first ever commuter experience Hackathon in Singapore and we invite you to hop on board.

Here’s your chance to realise your ideas and win attractive prizes at the same time:

  • Selected winners may receive up to S$120,000 for implementation of their ideas
  • Winners may enjoy NUS Enterprise’s exclusive Start-up support  for 3 months
  • Winners will also walk away with over $500 worth of prizes

We also welcome you to sign up for the exclusive pre-Commuthon event, Insider Tour, on 22 August 2014.

Discover what happens behind the scenes at SMRT, dialogue with SMRT representatives and go on an exclusive insider tour of the train, bus and taxi depots.

To register your interest and for more details, please log on to http://www.eventnook.com/event/commuthon2014

For further enquiries, please email us at commuthon@nus.edu.sg

Cheers,

NUS-SMRT Commuthon 2014
Organising Committee

Posted on July 31, 2014 by orbital

Dear students:

We’re almost at the end of Orbital!  We hope your summer self-study journey has been productive and that you have learned and broadened your horizons significantly on the topic of your choice.  Now that you’ve finished the final official Project README, video and log, it’s time to wrap up by evaluating your peers, and preparing for Splashdown on 22 Aug (Friday).

We’ll be posting a separate announcement about Splashdown later next week but for now, let’s concentrate on the evaluation of peer feedback.  This is the (very quick 1 question) evaluation that you do to assess how useful your peers have been in their feedback and critique of your project.  You’ll need to evaluate your peers as well as your adviser on this.  Details about this process are available on Post @1273 in Piazza and also as an 11-minute video recording on YouTube.

A quick note:  Those of you trying for higher levels of achievement may plan to get a lot more done on your project between now and Splashdown to meet that level of achievements’ criteria.  That’s fine — your peers will evaluate you on what you’ve done up to Evaluation 3, but you can petition (by writing to your adviser or to us (Min and Wee Sun) directly) to have your project re-reviewed for the higher level of achievement.  Make sure to do this by Splashdown (22 Aug) as that is the hard deadline for determining level of achievements, and we are likely to need to see your project’s outcome during the showcase to assess your final achievement level.

 

Posted on July 23, 2014 by orbital

Introduction to Ruby on Rails

In the last set of Mission Control sessions, we’ll be bringing you up to date with alternative (web and mobile stack) technologies that you can consider for future projects.  

Muneer, one of our famed advisers, is going to be putting on his other cap as tutor and teaching you about the basics of Ruby on Rails (which happens to be Min’s favorite web stack).

Ruby on Rails features yet another language (Ruby) and yet another framework (Rails).  David Heinemeier Hansson of the famed Basecamp productivity software created Rails from code that he worked on.  Rails has been applied in famous projects — such as Twitter and Github — as part of their initial base code.  Learn how the mantra of “convention over configuration” gets a web framework’s initial magic done very very quickly.

While we’ll try to make the session webcasted, do try to come down for the session.  You’ll then be able to say you’re exposed to yet another language (coders should be multilingual ^_^, not just on their resume / CV).  Also, if you think others would be interested in seeing the tutorial, feel free to circulate the announcement.

See you soon!

Post-Session Edit:

– Document: http://goo.gl/FidDXY
– Slides: http://goo.gl/G1dhig
– Video: http://youtu.be/tDJWJ-2BRjg

Posted on July 18, 2014 by orbital

This coming week there are two optional events happening both at Blk 71, please check them out!

1. Introduction to Node.js
2. Friday Feeds at Blk 71

Hope to see some of you at the events!

Mission Control #10 – Introduction to Node.js

In the last set of Mission Control sessions, we’ll be bringing you up to date with alternative (web and mobile stack) technologies that you can consider for future projects.  

This week your fellow SoCian, Ng Zhi An from NUS Hackers, will be presenting a tutorial on Node.js.  Please come down and give him your support for this penultimate Mission Control session!

Node.js is a software platform for scalable server-side and networking applications. Node.js applications are written in JavaScript.

Node.js applications are designed to maximize throughput and efficiency, using non-blocking I/O and asynchronous events. Node.js is commonly used for real time applications due to its asynchronous nature, allowing applications to display information faster for users without the need for refreshing. One typical real time application of Node.js  is to use it as a chat server.

Node.js combined with a browser, a document DB (such as MongoDB or CouchDB) and JSON offers a unified JavaScript development stack.

This workshop is part of the NUS SoC Orbital Summer Programme.  Presenter: Mr Zhi An Ng, NUS Hackers.

Invitation to Friday Feeds

From Blk71.  They would like to invite all Orbitees down to Blk 71 for a free event.  Laksa is served!  Register here: http://goo.gl/pfmdeG

Posted on July 11, 2014 by orbital

Introduction to Swift

In the last set of Mission Control sessions, we’ll be bringing you up to date with alternative (web and mobile stack) technologies that you can consider for future projects.  

Originally we were going to cover some introductory mobile app programming, but Min thought it would be more fun to lecture about something fairly new.  Min will be going over the basics of Swift, the new programming language outed by Apple last month at their WWDC event.

It turns out that while Swift is meant largely for developing mobile apps for the iOS platform, it is a full-fledged modern language, that inherits little bits from many languages including our favorite, Python.

Swift is a new general-purpose compiled programming language developed by Apple introduced last month. 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 playgrounds.  If time allows, we may cover a basic app that can be developed in iOS using Swift (this assumes some knowledge of iOS development that Min will gloss over).  An introductory level of knowledge of various programming languages will be helpful.  Unfortunately, since the Apple development environment is pretty closed and the language and tools for using it are still in beta, only those with access to Macs will be able to interactively do the exercises along with us.  Watch the Piazza forum’s follow-up to this post to access the Xcode Beta 6 IDE for Mac, needed for running samples in Swift.  The first hour of the workshop will be the tutorial, with free time for hands on in the remaining two.

While we’ll try to make the session webcasted, do try to come down for the session.  You’ll then be able to say you’re a Swift expert (pretty much everyone is not very swifty yet anyways, so you can’t be too wrong yet…)  Also, if you think others would be interested in seeing the tutorial, feel free to circulate the announcement.

See you soon!

Posted on July 6, 2014 by orbital

Our tutor, Mr Wang Gaoxiang, from our 2013 Orbital cohort will be giving you details about Unit testing in Google App Engine and Python this coming Tuesday.

While we’ll try to make the session webcasted, do try to come down for the session.  Your advisers have all chimed in to say that some prior knowledge of some of Software Engineering topics does help to make your life easier in the upcoming courses that you take in SoC in Year 2 and Year 3.  So we strongly advise that you read up on test driven development (TDD) and associate topics (like unit and integration testing), in addition to attending this optional Mission Control.

See you soon!

Screen Shot 2014-07-06 at 11.45.05 pm