Future of City Planning Summer Camp: Self-driving Car
It is that time of the year again when students learn and participate in what they love outside of school. What kind of summer would it be without an exciting and fun summer camp where students can make new friends, learn new skills and be creative! That is why during the past week, Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab(SZOIL) hosted an one-of-a-kind STEM* summer camp for students who are interested in the world of the future.
The theme of the camp was centered around “city planning” and how will it evolve in the future. And the concept of self-driving cars is inevitably the most convincingly realistic project of the future and the camp. For the first three and a half days of the seven day camp, students are trained to be “city planners” who can design and learn about city frameworks, infrastructures, important design thinking concepts, and critical thinking skills. With these new skills in their knowledge assets, they were ready to move forward.
To apply these new assets to real applicable purposes, students eagerly learned various computer-aided design software, such as AutoCad and Cura, to model their dream cities. After spending couple days of creative brainstorming, planning, redoing, discussing, and creative process, students went forward to use the laser cutting machines and 3D printer to etch and print out all of their designs.
Next challenge: Self-driving Car for Student-built “Future City”.
The Self-driving car portion of the camp was taught by Kazimirau Vladzislav, Jesus Vasquez, Jin Gao, Lachlan Jago, and Abdulhamid Mousa while the presentation was created by Hanna Valkova using HTML and CSS codes.
During the camp, students learned about critical electronic parts of a RC car,from Servo motors to specialized cameras, basic Linux terminal commands, terminal environment, git, concept of Github, Raspberry Pi, Servo control driver, and gained valuable hands-on experience on DIY projects.
After assembling the necessary electronic parts on to the car and properly installed the software and codes needed to achieve “self-driving”, students along with the instructors trained the cars by sampling over 20,000 visual, steering, and throttle data,
On the last day of the camp, students can finally harvest what they have sowed. Even with some minor hiccups during initial installation, the end products were perfect. Training went smoothly and the student-built RC cars were able to achieve self-driving!
At the end, students present their final products after three long days sharing what challenges or difficulties they had encountered, how they overcame these challenges, what they had learned, and their optimistic prospect for future of city planning. It was a successful camp where both the instructors and the students gained valuable experiences from each other in terms of: interpersonal social skills, group-collaboration experience, technical knowledge, specialized CAD training, and insightful prospect for the future.
Of course, the camp would not have been as successful without the help of every employees at Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab and other instructors, specifically Mr. Yang, Mr. Fei, and Ms. Emily Ke. Their time and efforts that contributed into this camp and the enthusiastic feedback and participation of the creative students were what made every moment worthwhile and drive SZOIL forward for future summer camps.
