Children's Museum of Houston- Week Four

Hey yah!

Well this is officially my last week at the Children’s Museum of Houston, I cry. This has been such an amazing experience but enough of that. My last day is actually next Wednesday, July 27th so I will just be coming in that day next week. I will come in to do the interview we apparently had to do which I had no clue about. I am really excited about it, I read through some of the questions the SLC provided as examples and I like the questions just because of the answers I am able to give.

So Monday and Tuesday were all in preparation for our big event with Chevron and the Texans celebrating and publicly speaking out about their partnership with the museum on the maker annex. Being able to be behind the scenes of setting up this event was really eye opening. There was a lot of drama between Chevron, Texans, and the museum just because some things didn’t go as planned but it still worked out at the end. Okay so all of the maker corps members had to be here that day (Tuesday) and we all had different workshops that we would be conducting. We had six different stations they included: 3-D printing, laser cutting, hydraulic bridge, soldering, Arduino programming with a mechanical robot arm, and my own workshop which was LEGO Mindstorms in programming them to actually play football. I could go through each workshop and talk about them but that would take too long so I will just give a brief description of mine. It was Lego mindstorms and the goal was for one player to score a touchdown and the other player to block him. The trick was you had no idea of knowing what way the other person was thinking of going. This was actually pretty cool besides them actually scoring a touchdown once in a while, it was so much fun seeing them crash into each other and basically have a robot fight. They would end up breaking one another and drag the other one across the field it was funny. Besides that it was nice to meet and have a brief conversation with the President of the Texans Jamey Rootes and the President of Chevron North America Jeff Shellebarger. Check me out too when they came for this it was recored by abc news, the Texans, and chevron but so far I could only find it on the Texans website but still cool (peep me at 1:15. http://www.houstontexans.com/tv-media/videos/Texans-Chevron-partner-for-Maker-Annex/7e34debe-6179-4b0c-bf59-ddcc4b3782e2

Also this week I was given the opportunity to run my own workshop which I decided on it being the Lego Mindstorms just because I was already so familiarized with it since I had been playing with it for a while. It was nice of them to let me be the lead on this weeks workshop. At first I was confident about it and I was good but then a lot of people started showing up out of no where and I was being over run. They stepped in and helped me but it was refreshing and made me step up on my leadership skills and know how to take charge. There was also some kids that I would show them how to work with it and they got the hang of it so quick and I was honestly impressed they were doing things that I still hadn’t mastered you can say. This one kid was showing me how to program the robots to do stuff I had no idea it could even do.

This week I was also invited to join in on a meeting with the Executive Director of the museum so I felt special. It was all of the interns of the museum meeting with her. In total it is four of us but I have no contact with them, they work across the street in the administration building so I never see them. We were able to talk to her about what we were doing and what could be improved. They do a lot of outreach stuff which was pretty cool and to hear some of their stories while I do more in house teaching with the maker annex. It was nice to see that the museum actually goes out into the community and attempts to teach these students.

Well its been real guys, I had so much fun here at the museum and learned so much. Going in I really had no expectations simply because when they told me I was going to be in the Maker Annex I had never heard of it. Now that I am at the end of the internship I don’t want my time to end here. I am constantly learning and developing new skills. Skills that I will take with me and use later in life. I have grown so much as a person since the beginning and it motivates me to be better. I hope you can all relate or in a way have changed in a good way. Thanks to all of this since Washington week I am actually undecided now on what I want to study at school Ha. In all good intentions possible though, I have just been showed all these new fields I never thought I would be interested but I am. Thankfully one of my co-workers has taken upon himself to figure this out and is basically printing out a list of all these majors and telling me to read them and just start crossing out ones I don’t like and yeah I think you guys get the picture. My community outreach reading isn’t until August 9th so am looking forward to that and meeting up with Claudia and Julio. Sorry for never really posting any pictures like I should have.

Goodluck for those of you who still have some more days to go until yah finish. Appreciate every day because it really was amazing for me and I hope the same for you guys. For those that this was there last week as well aye we made it woot woot!

Best Wishes, Edward Torres (you real if you know where that is from)

Arduino Board/Dice

3-D Printing

3-D Printing

Marble Run

Jack in the box (Hydraulic)

Cardboard Automata

Hydraulic Bridge

These were the robots playing football