We played hooky and I took the boys to Engineering Open House today. It was a good time as always. We started the day in the CS building and saw an anti-privacy database, some games, and a groovy computer generated animation. Then we stood in line for a while to get tickets to see Grant from Mythbusters speak that evening.
We spent the rest of the day in Talbot, Everit, and Loomis. Charles’ favorite part was a boat building exhibit. It was teaching how to trade-off resources versus performance. Each kid was giving $1200 which he had to use to buy materials to buy boats. Charles’ boat got on the score board at #6 for speed. The boys also enjoyed the radio controlled airplane group’s display. They had a nice RC simulator. Plus the got to build paper airplanes. Corwin got one to fling all the way across the lecture room.
We ended the day at Loomis Labs doing the perennial favorite, the lab van show. Zip the Monkey got shot and things exploded with liquid nitrogen. What’s not to like?
That evening we went back and heard Grant Imahara’s lecture. He told lots of stories about working with Mythbusters and ILM before that. He even was the actor in the C3PO costume for many of the character appearances during the second set of star wars movies. I enjoyed it, but with all the questions afterwards the boys were getting restless. We were crammed in the middle of a row, so I didn’t want to push out early.