July 23, 2008

Today is a day of preparation at Shad Valley, as tomorrow will be a day full of exhibitions and performances, including the Open House and the Variety Night, – as our Program Director, Ed, puts it: “do not plan to do anything tomorrow, for tomorrow you are mine.”

Nevertheless, the learning never ends. One of the most experienced staff members, Paul, gave a lecture on repair. He used clever examples to illustrate the principles of repair, and then demonstrated them with some of the broken things that Shads brought. Having accumulated years of experience in repair, Paul is definitely amazing at teaching it.

Then, the preparation began.

We started off with building a Patagoras Suichui, a device in which one event triggers the next, ultimately leading to a cool visual effect. We were split into eight teams (each being a letter of WATERLOO), and we had the next two hours to make a Patagoras Suichui that is easily reassembled, simple to set-up, and perform the desired effect flawlessly three times in a row. We are told that only by meeting all those criteria will our project be presented tomorrow.

So we hurried to finish the project, scrambled to assemble each piece, and had the great satisfaction of watching everything come together. Then there was presentation. Some groups were successful, while others were asked to refine their designs during the presentation. Ultimately, every project met the criteria in record time.

After lunch, we had our Program Director’s last lecture on signal processing and machine perception. This time it was on looking for clusters within a chaotic dataset. By being able to group chaotic datasets, recognition and classification can occur, and the training of machines to recognize objects is made possible.

Then we prepared for the Open House. Some of us worked on posters, others worked on music and slideshows, and still others were organizing workers – so that Open House can be made possible. Afterwards, we had thirty minutes to clean out our rooms for a room check.

We then had some free time. Some of us chose to use the free time to buy souvenirs, while others used it for practicing for Variety Night, others still used that time to finish up on posters and slideshows. After free time, we were allowed to eat outside the cafeteria – in any restaurant we chose. We were given ten dollars for this special privilege.

After a fabulous, personalized, dinner, we came together as a group, and talked about what is happening at the Variety Night. We then had more time to prepare for Variety Night.

Such is a busy, but fulfilling day, at Shad. The atmosphere of sadness from departures was not obvious, as the tight schedule makes reminiscing impossible without being suspected to be lazy. Tomorrow is a big day, and we are certainly well prepared for it.

David Zhang
Shad Valley Waterloo
Hometown: Burnaby, British Columbia