Category Archives: announcements

Orbital Special Interest Groups

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Posted on April 30, 2015 by orbital

As you will have noticed, Orbital 2015 is using Slack for communications.  Slack is like a chat client and organized into channels (something like old style IRC, if you are from that era).

We have seeded a few channels in our team for groups who want to meet like-minded groups to share ideas.  Join as many or as few as you like.  Advisors, Mentors and Tutors will be joining in channels that also meet their expertise or interests. Feel free to start your own channel using the #sig- prefix convention.

  • Sig-NUS – For teams working on NUS related projects (IVLE, NUSmods).
  • Sig-Cloud – For teams interested or using cloud computing components inclusive of IDEs, PaaS, SaaS (e.g., Cloud9, Nitro.us, Heroku, Amazon EC2, EngineYard)
  • Sig-Game – For teams interested in developing games (Unity, PyGame, HTML5 Canvas, PhaserIO)
  • Sig-HW – For teams (and other interested parties) whose projects might include a hardware component (e.g., quadcopters, smartwatch, arduino, raspberry pi, Lego Mindstorms)
  • Sig-Mobile – For teams interested in mobile app development (on iOS, Droid, etc.)
  • Sig-Web – For teams doing web development of sorts (any stack and any language; Py/GAE, Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Py/Flask. PHP/CodeIgniter).

P.S. Finally, if you find Slack useful, you might want to use Slack to create your own team (n.b., not channel) for your own Orbital project, and invite your advisor to be a part.  Some of your seniors have found this platform useful for syncing up with project mates and it seems not to be blocked by certain authorities, specially helpful for teammates that are geographically spread out.

Welcome to Slack!

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Posted on April 9, 2015 by orbital

SlackWe’re going to try to use Slack as our communications platform for Orbital 2015.  All of those who have expressed their interest in Orbital have been invited to join Slack in the orbital2015 team*.  We hope you’ve got your invite and if not, please check your spam folder (we’ve sent it to the address you gave us as your primary in your registration of interest).

Update: about 1/2 of the cohort has joined Slack, but the other half may have missed their invitation.  If you didn’t get an invite at this point (9 Apr 2015), you may want to check your spam and trash mail folders.  We send the invitation to the address you indicated was your primary address.

In Slack, you (and your teammate, if you registered as a team) will be assigned to a peer evaluation group (an EG) within the next few weeks.  Your advisors will be leading you through the Orbital program as part of their EG.  Stay tuned!  You will receive announcements from Orbital via this #announce channel (they will also be available on the orbital.comp.nus.edu.sg homepage).  See you and good luck on your remaining weeks in Sem II.

Orbitees will gradually be added to this team in slack for Orbital.  Tell your friends who’ve filled out the Registration of Interest form at http://goo.gl/forms/5IU2EiGhoH not to worry yet, as we’re trying to bring up all of our administration up to speed in preparation for the summer.

See you on 11-12 May for the Liftoff Workshop!

* for those from other faculty or outside of NUS and SoC, we may not have accepted your registration yet, due to capacity constraints.  Stay tuned!

Amazon sponsors Orbital with US$ 17,500 education grant for projects this summer

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Posted on April 2, 2015 by orbital

Dear all, we’re excited to share with you that Amazon has awarded our course with credits for trying and using Amazon’s famous Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).  Teams angling for a taste of EC2 will be assigned an account for US$100 for their work on their Orbital summer project.

Stay tuned for more details around the Liftoff workshop.  Looking forward to the exciting summer again!  We’re very excited to be supported by AWS in Education Grant award.

Forward planning for NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC)

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Posted on March 23, 2015 by orbital

NUS Overseas Colleges

Breaking News!  Gean shared with us at the briefing that NOC is prepared to let all Orbital students who achieve Project Gemini and above a straight exemption to Round 2 (final) selection interviews for the NOC programme.  Get your leg up on your application for this flagship NUS programme by participating in Orbital this summer!

This just in: NUS Overseas Colleges, the hallmark NUS programme that supercharges exchange programmes and local industrial experiences is in cahoots with SoC’s Orbital programme.  This means a big break for those of you angling for NOC.

NOC is a year-long overseas attachment at a global city that pairs you with a paid internship at start-up to learn firsthand the wide range of responsibilities needed, as well as giving you academic and entrepreneurial acumen as a student attached to a prestigious university.  In the two cities where Orbital students are often attached, that is NYU Poly for New York City and Stanford for Silicon Valley.  Such an experience will set you apart from many peers at other institutions but also from other peers within NUS and even SoC.

NOC Head of Marketing and Selection Processes Gean Chu will be coming to the Orbital briefing on the 11th to describe the pathways forward after Orbital.  She will give you the lowdown on NOC and describe why your Orbital summer gives you the leg-up on the application process for NOC.

Over 100!

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Posted on March 10, 2015 by orbital

Image Credits: Taiwanese American . Org

Orbital registrations today put us over 100 students interested in the programme.  We are well on our way to another record-breaking year of student participation in Orbital.

Why not you too?  Drag your friends, buddies and peers to get your summer supercharged?  Register now!


http://goo.gl/forms/5IU2EiGhoH


P.S. – Don’t forget that for Orbital, there will be a mandatory 2-day workshop, Liftoff, that you must attend on the 11-12th of May at SoC, as communicated to you in the roadshows.  This is the Monday and Tuesday directly after final exams for Sem 2.  You are advised to extend your stay in your hall/hostel for a few days after exams are over to accommodate this requirement.

Orbital Briefing on 11 Mar 2015, 16:30-17:15 in COM1 #02-12 (SR1)

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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!

2015 roadshows coming your way!

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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)

Splashdown – Good luck tomorrow!

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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.

“Go” for Splashdown!

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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!