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!