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

Splashdown is separated into poster sessions, held back to back, in SR1 (Seminar Room 1) and lobby.  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?

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 NUS Overseas Colleges, and the Entrepreneurship unit of our school, that are on relevant “where to go from here, life after Orbital” topics.  Oh, yeah – did we mention there are like a ton of ongoing hackathons that you could also participate in?

Some tips for a good re-entry and Splashdown (your results may vary):

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

– Do print out your posters early.  It will be busy 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 Rachel Lim, or Mrs Kwek to help you place the posters in the right area for pickup.  We will deliver all of the posters we receive to SR1 on Wednesday afternoon around 17:30 (yes, the whole 30m away from the UG office — you’re welcome!)

– Do check the layout of the session right before Splashdown.  We are still shifting poster slots around due to last-minute changes.  Consult the printed posters as they will be the definitive version — we may not have time to update the website on Wednesday.

– 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 (Aaron advertised it to CS1231), so you can also chat with them to tell them about your lessons learned — and tell them to take Orbital

– 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.  There will be public voting to determine the best project for each of the three levels of achievement.  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!

– 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.

– By default, your name, level of achievement, and project team and the link for your final project video will be captured and made public on the Skylab web app, but if you don’t want it to be captured up there, please send Min (‘knmnyn’ on Slack) a DM; we’ll be happy to take it down.  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.

Dear all:

Your second Orbital hurdle is here!  Please make sure to put up your project’ revised README and log into Skylab (no later than tonight 27 Jun 11:59pm SGT).  The only difference from Milestone 1 is that you can make a new video of up to three minutes in length.  Hopefully your team has made some progress on prototyping, but even if you haven’t, just explain how your project is going.

Remember, at the end of Orbital you’ll be evaluated on your finished project — it doesn’t really matter how you get there (i.e., whether you’re behind where you want to be now).

Thanks to the groups who have at least put in a preliminary or final project README and log into Skylab.  Note that you need to inform your EG adviser in advance of the deadline if for some reason you cannot make the deadline.  You must inform your advisers in advance, or lateness may count against your eligibility for getting credit for Orbital.

In the following week, you’ll also need to do the peer evaluations of your three peer teams in your evaluation group. These evaluations are due in Skylab no later than 4 Jul 11:59pm (exactly 1 week later).

As you know, we’ll be having 300+ students in Orbital Liftoff, and dealing with all your peers may be a bit difficult logistically.

1) Just in case you weren’t sure, lunch is on your own.  And we’re all breaking for lunch at the same time.  As such you may find that that the trek back and forth from I3 to Biz / Arts canteen or other places nearby for the short, 1 hour lunch break is really too short.  For those who can pack a lunch to bring, this might be a better alternative (I know I will).

2) If all of us whip out your laptop and plug them in, the building will go dark (just kidding).  Bring freshly charged laptops to the venue and alternate with your partner so you both can just use one (You heard of pair programming, right?  Now try paired down programming…)  Fully charged power banks are good if you are using a mobile device too.

3) Wi-fi: same here.  Wi-fi is know to be spotty in COM1 and last year in I3 we didn’t have any problems with Wi-fi, but … if we can all be considerate and turn off the ‘net on devices that you don’t need it for, we’ll all have a better chance of trying some of the hands-on online.

4) There will likely be some materials circulated by presenters earlier to help you deal with installation of the necessary software; and in some intrepid cases, even lecture notes.  This is the first year we may get to doing these materials (Orbital is still very much a dynamic module with constant design changes), so please bear with us on this.  Do look out for these being circulated on Slack.

5) Many of the workshop presenters will be your fellow peer SoCians, who have volunteered to make Orbital great (some of them are also Orbitee students!)  Please acknowledge their help and give them a big up for tackling this mad task of teaching at Orbital.

Hope your exams have gone well!   It’s time to start to look forward to Liftoff, the mandatory 2 day workshop on 9 and 10 May.  Join your 300+ other Orbitees on our unified summer quest to learn something new and interesting for yourselves.

The venue for our workshop will be at I3, down past SoC and Biz.  We’ll be in primarily in the I3 Auditorium although an alternate track will be held in the I3 Seminar Room and some activities down the hall in NUS Enterprise’s fully loaded Hangar.

If you’re not sure how to get there, please check out the instructions here, or better yet, give a shout out on Slack.

The schedule has been updated on the Orbital calendar (available on the website and through Google’s public calendar service), so check it out.  We’ll post some more details about it soon, as well as some of the prerequisite things you may / will need to do before attending on Monday.

If you can’t make it to Liftoff, please let your evaluation group leader know if you are part of a team (use Slack!); if you are a singleton a.k.a. “partner challenged”, just let Min know by email <kanmy@comp.nus.edu.sg> or Slack <@knmnyn>.  Groups must have at least one member present to do the duties during the workshop (yes, you have to do some work!).  Exceptions to these two conditions will be approved on a case-by-case basis.

You’ve got questions, we’ve got answers.  Actually, no.  We have answers and perhaps you have the questions.  Anyways, if you’re wondering about Orbital, please take a look through some of the questions that have surfaced in previous cohorts about the eligibility, time frame, partner matching, levels of achievement and other topics, in the comments (i.e., click the link below the post that shows the number of comments).  You can also ask additional questions here or on our Facebook page.

Do note that registration is not yet open. We plan to open registration after the Chinese New Year break in February. There will be a briefing about Orbital and likely another event to help match prospective partners with each other in a face to face meet-up. We’ll be announcing more details as we go forward through your CS 1010, 1020, 2020, 2010 (and variants) lecturers.