Fishes, Animals, Robotic Personalities. And Spiderman

Today was our last full day in Sydney. So we did everything. In the morning we went round the Sydney Aquarium.

..where they had some sharks...

..some jelly fish..

..some fishy cupcakes..

...and Nemo.

Then we moved on to the small zoo. This is not on the scale of the big zoo we saw on Monday, but you can get a lot closer to the animals and insects.

Butterflies

All together now, Ahhh.....

..and this would be the wombat. In the afternoon we went to the Powerhouse Museum, which is a bit like the Science Museum in the UK, with some fantastic exhibits including a virtual personality on the end of a robot arm.

I asked it a most revealing question.

It particularly likes Camembert apparently..

They also had a Verbot, which I remember playing with many years ago.

We took a ride back on a genuine, bonafide, five car monorail.

This was the view as we were having tea. Very nice. After we had eaten we went to watch the new Spiderman movie. It was good fun, although you have to ask yourself why they made it. And then you remember that you’ve just given somebody a bunch of cash to see it.

Getting Arty in Sydney

We started the day with a trip to the Museum of Contemporary Art which was fascinating. I don’t really understand all the art, but I know what I like, and there was enough of that for me, along with some thought provoking stuff.

From the cafe we got a great view of boats doing a square dance in the dock outside.

After a coffee we went and took a look at the Sydney Harbour bridge close up. Well impressive. Some of the students and judges had been able to do the walk along the top of the bridge over the weekend. You can just see one set of plucky souls doing just that on the left hand part of the bridge at the top. I was sort of keen to do it, except that I suffer a bit from vertigo. And they wouldn’t have allowed me to take a camera….

This is a view of the underneath of the bridge. Solid Stuff.

Exploring Sydney

The Sydney locals call this “The Gear Lever” or something like that. All I know about it is that you can go to the top, and when you get there the views are really, really good.

This is the looking towards Darling Harbour, where the Imagine Cup was based. The bridge in the middle of the picture is lined with Imagine Cup flags 

This is the view of the flags on the bridge, complete with genuine, bonafide, electrified, five car monorail..Once we got down from the tower we walked round to the Sydney Opera Hose.

This is half way around the dock, where they had this chap drawing a really nice picture on the ground.

Once we got round to the Botanical Gardens we waited a while for the sun to set so that we could get ourselves a picture.

Imagine Cup Winners

Today we had the World Final presentations. These are the top three teams. Congratulations to all, very well done. I’m very proud to have played a part in getting you folks to the finish podium. The standard this year was even higher than last year, and that was an amazing year too.

What was interesting to me was that of the six finalists, four of them had designed and built their own hardware. Some teams were creating and building surface mount devices (even etching their own circuit boards). Others had undertaken ambitious mechanical designs builds. Several of the teams had applied for patents based on their entries and all of them had workable business plans. As a judge I often had to pinch myself to remind me that these were student teams, not experienced developers pitching several years of effort.

In the afternoon, before the awards ceremony, I spent two very happy hours walking around the showcase booths where each of the 72 teams was set up and telling everyone all about their entries. Special shout out to the team from Peru with their Kinect based solution for helping children with Down’s Syndrome, one team member had even painted his hand bright red to help with the demonstration on the demo floor. Also I must mention the iQube team from Romania, who had designed and built some astonishing electronics inside something not much larger than a couple of matchboxes.

The Imagine Cup this year completely rocked. The organisation was top notch, with Ali and Jeff putting in sterling efforts to make everything just worked. Australia was a fantastic venue and every contestant has had a life changing experiences, as have the judges.Next year the Imagine Cup moves on to Russia. I really, really hope I can get to go there.

Imagine Cup Finalists

All set for judging

This morning we had our six finalists strut their stuff. We used two ballrooms in the conference centre, and shuttled between them so that the teams had time to set up and we could keep the action flowing. What impressed me was the huge number of students who turned up to see the presentations. The places were packed, which was great. And the presentations delivered, which was excellent too. Once we had seen all the presentations we entered our scores into the judging system and then tomorrow we’ll find out who won at the World Finals. After lunch we headed out on one of the cultural afternoon trips, to the zoo. Which was amazing, with loads of animals and a great view of Sydney.

Harbour view

One of these animal pictures is not as real as the others.