Day 2: Google and Opening Ceremony

What an awesome day! We woke up and went to breakfast at a diner. Then we went and experienced all the ISEF activities at the Convention Center. The displays were so cool and interactive. There's a digital graffiti wall, a DJ station, and an Expo where different companies set up displays...including Rock Band and Wii (Jared did beat me, though). The Army had a display, so we had to get a pic of Jared in a Bullet proof vest.







Google has a display that's really awesome. You can drive a robot using an Android phone, play with all of their Apps, sit in the car they take all the Street Maps pics with, and use Google Earth on a huge surrounding flatscreens. We zoomed into Mount Everest, and it actually felt realistic. We also got our picture with the inventor of USB from Intel, Ajay Bhatt.



Then we ate a quick snack/lunch and headed out to go on our tour of Google and the Computer History Museum. Google was really awesome inside...although it looks like they have a lot of stuff to goof off with and are teated very well. They have exercise rooms, laundromats, pool tables, foosball tables, 17 cafeterias, and some really cool stuff in development. No pictures are allowed inside, but I took an outside shot. After visiting Google, we went to the Computer History Museum. Not the most exciting museum in the world, but pretty educational (also half the musem was closed off).

We made it back in time to walk with the other Sarasotans down to San Jose State University for the Opening Ceremony dinner...some good buffet style food. We had some time to kill before the Ceremony started, so we found the Student Union, and you guessed it, bowled a game (kind of a MaST tradition).

The Opening Ceremony was AWESOME! There were some very cool performances beforehand. There were a lot of countries, and they had kids from each come on stage. Larry Paige, the co-founder of Google, mad a guest appearance. The head of Intel gave a talk and some of the Intel "Rock Stars" gave a really cool panel discussion. But the highlight of the ceremony must have been when the director of the Society for Science was giving her talk. She was highliting a few projects, saying "we have projects ranging from .... to ...." She did that for only about 8 projects, and the last one she said "and we have a project where flexible body armor was made using a shear-thickening fluid." I gave a little shout...but it was really cool to hear Jared's project as one of only 8 described during the evening (Over 1600 students are here, by the way). Hopefully it's a shape of things to come. :-)


Well, after a day filled with excitement, we went back to the convention center and checked the final violation list. Jared's project was not on it, so it looks like we're good to go to San Francisco tomorrow!