Insight on the Future

Well, as to keep my word, I'm posting everything I did at the MTU Summer Youth Programs, in the Computer Engineering Class. Note that I am 1 hour away from my deadline :D.

MTU SYP 2005

Monday- Morning began with a long EE powerpoint, then we went on some tours of some of the rooms in the EERC building, which is where my class is. Immediately I discovered that I had one of the teachers that I had last year, and I was also in the same room too. We then went to lunch. After lunch a computer-engineering professor came and did a presentation on how the hardware in a computer works. It was interesting but after awhile it got boring. Then he had us all get into groups of three and each group got a computer and took it apart, which is always the easy part.

Putting everything back into the computer was a little tricky but my partner did this before so we were able to get it working. It seems like in every class I take at MTU about two kids always seem to know as much as the professors and three are always Linux obsessives. All this pretty much lasted until the end of the day. Back at the hotel I went swimming with my brother for a while and used my dad’s laptop with the wireless network the hotel provides. And that’s just about it.

Tuesday- My alarm went off at 6:30 but then l fell back to sleep until 8. I had to eat and shower very quickly to make it to the building I'm in by 9:00. We started out by running power through our circuits we made with a breadboard and two resistors. We measured the resistance and voltage through the resistors with multimeters. Then we got to use the oscilloscopes, which display the wavelength of the electricity flowing through the circuits. I adjusted mine so that it looked exactly like a heart monitor screen.

After this we got a tour of the room where they etch patterns into silicon wafers. Then we got a tour of the room where they use plasma to do something to the wafers. From here we went to lunch, where I saw alex eppert. We talked for two seconds then I went and ate. Before class started again I went to the campus store but didn't buy anything. Once class started, we started working on soldering our own circuits with some LEDs and stuff, and they taught us binary and hexadecimal number systems, which I already knew. I failed to properly solder one of my pieces on correctly and had to de-solder all 8 prongs. We worked on this for a while until a professor came in and demonstrated what happens when a capacitor blows up. The first one burst into flames and the second one popped and split apart. This was all done in a plastic box of course.

At 4:30 class got done and my mom and brother picked me up and we went to DQ to eat. I got a mocha Moolatte which is almost a good as Starbuck's Frappucino. At 6:30 I played tennis with some ppl from SYP for an hour, then with Jeremy until my blood sugar dropped and I had to eat food. I'm not diabetic though I just get these weird drops in blood sugar sometimes. Then I came back to the hotel and swam in the pool then watched Napoleon Dynamite on our oprtable DVD player. Tomorrow I'm hoping to get some pictures ad video, which I’ll post on Friday.

Wednesday- Today didn’t start out the greatest, because I spent one hour finishing my soldering project and then two hours I spent troubleshooting and de-soldering, until I finally realized that a prong on one of the transistors and on the processor were bent back and were not making any connection at all. Then I went to lunch. The food actually isn’t all that bad, a lot better then some of the places I’ve eaten at. After lunch the teachers explained logic gates and Boolean algebra and that kind of stuff. Then we went on some more tours of some rooms. One was where we got to see how the processing chips can be programmed by ultraviolet light with a computer. When we came back we worked on the computer using PSPICE, which is software that you can use to build virtual circuits then simulate them. We also worked with the oscilloscopes and function generators a little bit. The kid that sits next to me told me that his motor skills are so low that he almost qualifies for being handicap lol. I don’t know if I feel safe being by him when he solders. The other kid that sits next to me is annoying and he slapped me three times because that is the only method he uses to get my attention. After SYP I ate at Subway then we went to see our dog at a kennel in Hancock.

Thursday- Today it was very boring and monotonous in the morning. All we did was use the function generator and oscilloscopes for two hours. I was ready to do something else after one hour had passed. Then we made a small circuit with a diode, capacitor and resistor, and got a tour of a some rooms filled with some high-powered servers and a massive Cray supercomputer. The professor said that when they install a supercomputer like that they have to have a Cray technician come in and connect every single wire and cut them to exact length because the computer needs to know the time it will take for an electron to get from one part to another part for it to run at maximum performance. During lunch I had an allergic reaction and my lip got all puffy lol it was weird. After lunch we went to one of the rooms and a professor showed us a $2000 machine that makes circuit boards by milling paths in the thin copper layer. Then we went to another room where there was some cool stuff that delt with electric motors and some demonstrations with radio waves. Then we came back to the room and I started a project soldering together a small solar powered car which I should have done by tomorrow morning if everything goes smoothly, (whatever can go wrong, will). After that I ate at Subway and we drove home.

Friday- We drove to Houghton in the morning and I got to class on time. I finished soldering my “solar speeder” car, and it worked when it was in direct sunlight, but not inside because the fluorescent lights charged the capacitor at .02 Volts/minute hahaha and the motor needs 2.2 Volts just to run. Somehow, I poked my thumb with a very sharp wire and started bleeding profusely, but then 20 minutes later I poked my index finger on one of the prongs on a chip, and the same thing hapenned lol. Peter, the kid that sat next to me, hooked a small solar panel up to the power amplifier and put 20 Volts through it and it started emitting a ton of smoke and it melted all the wires inside of it lmao. When I finished that project I just used the computer and didn’t really do anything for the rest of the time.

Lunch wasn’t too bad. After lunch my brother and my mom and dad came to see me and we toured the newly renovated library and then went to the campus store and I bought some stuff. Back at class we didn’t do much until we went on some tours of what other classes were doing like the acting class, which did a play for everyone to watch. It definitely wasn’t the best play I’ve ever seen. Actually it was one of the worst plays I’ve ever seen. After that we went to the web design class but all we did was play games on the sweet Macs they had. Then we came back and once again we didn’t do much, except just talk, however a few ppl were soldering and typing C++ code, but I had enough of that from all week. Then we went downstairs and had ice cream and sat there for about an hour, and Grant told us a bunch of hilarious stories about when he was an undergraduate student at MTU. And then it was over just like that. Each year the summer youth programs seem to go by faster and faster. My family and me ate at The Ambassador, which is a popular restaurant in Houghton. Then we drove home. That is the conclusion of my experience at the 2005 SYP.