Day 4 – Tuesday, December 7th, 2004
From left: the Indonesian journalist,
a rep. from Oracle Malaysia and me.We woke up heading for an interesting day as well as the peak of the whole event. This day would be jam-packed with activities. To get it started, there was Asia Pacific Press Conference where participants from the Asia Pacific regions gathered to meet their local presses. Then, we had a meeting session with young professionals in the technology industries. We were brought in a room where five individuals have waited: an artist from Lucasfilm, a multimedia producer from Macromedia, Google’s product manager, someone from Yahoo!, and a software engineer from Oracle. They shared with us their personal journey from start to what they have become now. Interestingly the initial questions were not about how the students can make best choices in their life as the discussion is supposed to be, but rather an enthusiasm on Google’s uprising over Yahoo!. To end up the session, Roel Robles, the artist from Lucasfilm gave us free postcards. Raja Shah, the man from Google gave away free Google t-shirts!
We had 30 minutes of snack break, before we started the next workshop – the robotics workshop. The robotics workshop was very interesting, TQ invited people from NASA and winning robotics teams in national competition. There were three blocks of presentation, each from different institution, and we had to divide our people into three groups. The three groups were then swapped in turn. The first block that I was in was the autonomous robot that could do jobs like identifying its surroundings, find ways and move, and then identify objects. It has a camera on its head, 360 degrees view. So how does it move? It is controlled by human through a computer. You just enter the command, like first identify surroundings by taking a panoramic view through its camera. Then, enter which way to go and the robot will shift to the respective direction. Soon, command it to move at a certain distance. When it finds an object, it will take picture and analyse it. Cool!
The second block was a sports robot. It plays a game specially designed for robots, which commands the robot to insert a ball into a container. The team who made the rather bulky robot (it has long arms) did not demonstrate the robot, which was the thing I hoped to see, because it’s too dangerous. The last block was rather simple, they created robots from Lego™ blocks, and give triggers to it through a mechanism, allowing straight movements as well as turnings when an object is heading. The robotics workshop ended with some free stickers and flyers of several robotics competitions in my hands.
Making it at Zeum
Then, we had lunch as usual. Next schedule was attending the Zeum workshop. Zeum is a non-profit entity whose mission is to spark creativity among the public by offering hands-on multimedia productions. One of these is the workshop to create your own claymation, or animation using clays. The 19 and Under group got to do the claymation thing, so we entered a pretty much cool room with clay characters, overhead TVs and two units of Macs and cameras to shoot the movie. For starter, we were given introduction by the instructor and were shown clips of past done movies. The instructor then gave us quite a lot of clay blocks of many colors. We were divided by four groups to then create our own characters and stories. My team did a space battle scene. Fortunately they had a backdrop of the Earth from space. The other teams did some monkey-climbing-up-a-tree-and-then-falling scene, super-heros-fighting-each-others-to-save-lives scene and cowboys-shooting-each-others-to-death scene. So how did we shoot the movie, anyway? There were two units of Macs and each equipped with a camera that can be tilted and optically adjusted. A table with backdrop was infront of it. There’s automated software that when you press ‘6’ will capture the scene. So I operated the picture-taking thing while my other teammates adjusted the clays as how the story went, frame by frame, second by second! I realised soon that producing claymation movie isn’t an easy thing, but it’s indeed fun! The Zeum workshop lasted for about two hours.
This isn't a steamboat, for sure.Soon we headed back to the Marriott and we had free time until 4.45pm when we’d get ready for the awards ceremony in Exploratorium! My father and I spent the free time having some afternoon snack just a few blocks from the Marriott. When the time came, we were given badges with a blue ribbon in every winner stating “Winner”. Cool, I thought!
The lovely night
Can you guess what this is?
Anneke, Jillian and WillemThe buses soon were on their ways to Palace of Fine Arts in the Presidio, where the Exploratorium is located. Exploratorium is an interactive hands-on science museum with thousands of exhibits that visitors can mingle with. It was there where the Awards Ceremony was held. The guests were greeted at the front gate where they could take off their coats and start with a welcome drink and appetizer. While we enjoyed our appetizer, there were enough attractions to keep us entertained. If you’ve been to a fun science museum, you have the idea of what it’s like. Kids and adults alike were busy with the exhibits. Approaching 7.30pm, we headed for the tables. 
The whole Exploratorium in sight.Table 12, that was mine. I was in the same table with my dad, Carol’s family and Mark Atkinson, TeachScape director who is also one of the Board of Directors in Oracle Education Foundation. The food that night was great, as always during the whole TQ Live procession.
They're in my table, yeah...When the second ticked to 8pm, the prize-giving part commenced. We were the sixth team in turn to get on stage and receive the prize. It was a great feeling after some years doing ThinkQuest to finally feel the real thing of such a celebration. I’d like to thank ThinkQuest for all the opportunity that they have given to students around the world to have the experience of a lifetime. We went back to the hotel with a new fond memory, and a crystal trophy!
It's a happy ending!As soon as we got back to the hotel, Carol asked me to fill in the names and addresses of our current ThinkQuest team members – Ngoc, Lan, Ammu and Ben – on their San Francisco postcards.