Dear teachers: This is what Ben did last week (but not homework.) - Made his own travel and how things work video footage of the entire trip - Kept up with all flight numbers and times. - Went to the cable car museum to learn how the cable car system works, saw the machinery, then rode cable cars around San Francisco and down to Ghiradelli Square for a giant sundae. - Had dim sum in China town from a place that had no English signs. - Spent time in the flagship Apple store and befriended a few employees. - Spent most of a day at the California Academy of Sciences. He saw everything, but his favorite exhibits were the living roof (largest in the world), the giant Foucault Pendulum, the Earthquake exhibit, the planetarium and the aquarium. - Rode on an historic carousel at Pier 39 - Went on a bay cruise under the Golden Gate bridge and around Alcatraz. - Visited the secretive Google X labs! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_X Where he: -- Met with the Google Glass team (google/glass/start/) , saw a 3D printer, saw all of the prototypes for Google Glass, learned about their design and prototyping process, learned about and stood inside an an-echoic chamber, learned how to solder on an electronics board, and worked a thermal imaging camera. -- Saw the production line for the first Google Glass product and helped to make pieces for the yet-to-be-announced-cant-talk-about-it product. He suited up in a clean room, used a plasma chamber, loaded the pieces into a precision robot for work, and then learned how to program a robotic arm and wrote a short program to knock cups off of a table. -- Saw the facility where they stress-test products (or professionally break things) and got to simulate dropping Google Glass until it broke, learned about machines that simulate corrosion and more, and heard about Project Loon and Google Fiber. -- Rode in a self-driving car around Mountain View, CA, learned about how radar and laser work together to see things that human eyes cant see, and learned about their meticulous testing process. He observed their artificial intelligence software work in conjunction with mapping software to show us what it was seeing. It was amazing but was like being driven by the safest driver in the world, and thats a good thing! After a while, I wanted to take a nap. -- Had lunch with a lady who works at Google who also has muscular dystrophy. -- Met with the Google Chromebook team, got to build one of their laptops (using a $20k screwdriver!), dug through their parts bin with a few engineers asking about everything, learned about their testing processes, and brought home a Chromebook and an extra motherboard. -- Saw the Google Garage where anyone can go build whatever they want. -- Met with the guys who keep everyones computers working and poked through their parts bins looking for a particular HDMI cable he needed. -- Ended the day with the Google tour that most executives get. - The next morning, he toured the Airbnb headquarters, met the CEO, built his first web page (benoogle), and was filmed for a yet-to-be-released video. On one of their doodle walls, he proudly drew a stick figure farting, and they laughed.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 02:26:16 +0000
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