A few weeks ago, on Sunday night, I received an email with the subject line “Favor”. For anyone who’s used email for any length of time, this should send a chill down their spine. The email was from an administrator at my department who had a last-minute request for me to give a tour with “LOTS of demos” to a group of visiting middle- school students.
Middle-schoolers are a notoriously tough demographic, so this wouldn’t have been my first choice of how to spend a Monday afternoon. Also, careful readers might note that MARS was completely broken as of the previous Friday, which would seem to put a slight crimp in the whole “lots of demos” thing.
But, I’m congenitally unable to say “no” to anything, so that was how I found myself spending the entirety of Monday morning debugging CAN issues. I gave this about a 50% chance of success when I went in, but it turns out that I got really lucky. I was able to quickly verify that a second CAN transceiver had failed, and, crossing my fingers, I replaced it with my very last spare. When everything was wired up, I turned on the scope and started seeing little squiggly lines again. We were back in business.
At that point, I only had an hour or so before the demo, so I spent the time desperately cleaning up the lab and making sure that all the software worked.
Then, my audience arrived.
One thing that’s nice about having an audience of children is that you can instantly tell when they’re interested in something, and when they’re bored. They are also, to some extent, easily impressed. Just moving the robot around was exciting. And, when I (perhaps unwisely) allowed them to drive the robot,
suddenly I became incredibly cool.
Rui was there too soldering BIRD stuff. I neglected to explain to him what was going on beforehand, so he was surprised and a little peeved when his work area was suddenly invaded by raucous tweens.
One of the kids was asking about the 3D prints that we use on the robot. He was visibly impatient with me when I tried to explain them in my normal “I’m talking to laypeople” way. Gradually, I became aware that he actually knew an impressive amount about 3D printing. He said that he had a Bambu P1S at home, which surprised me a little. If I had asked for an $800 3D printer at age 12, my parents would have laughed at me.
At some point, though it felt like barely any time had passed, the teacher informed me that we had used up the entire half-hour block. The whole time, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep my audience entertained. The last thing we did before they left was take a picture of everyone in front
of the robot. It’s one of the rare photos of me where I’m genuinely smiling.
A couple of days later, the teacher sent me an email with lots of exclamation points. I forwarded it to Dr. Li. He loves successful outreach. They also said they would give me a T-shirt, but as of this writing, I haven’t gotten it yet. I don’t really mind, though.
Most tours and demos that I do are basically chores. They just take up time that I could be using to do research. This was one of the first times where I felt like “outreach” was actually worth it.
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