Rise & Shine: A 7am Start

Earth Day started at 7am with everyone helping to construct the dome. The dome was custom-designed for Earth Day specifically and required true collaborative spirit to assemble the many small pieces together. Once we felt that this was going quite well, Raquel and I started fixing and setting up our Trash Trivia tent just before 9am.

Wind & Sailor Skills

Around this time was when I realised just exactly how windy the day was as we were trying to tie the bottom of the tent to sandbags to secure and prevent them from flying away. This required some real strength. As I went around the tent tying the bottom to sandbags every yard or so, my hands got cold, scratched, and rough like sandpaper. At some point, Raquel and I felt quite hopeless as it seemed that whatever we tried the tent still looked like a dress being blown up by the wind. The tying system we tried to implement seemed to be not working. Not only that the bottom of the tent was a problem, there was too much light coming in through the gap between the tent material making up the tent wall and the roof of the tent. We decided that one of us would have to go around the tent, lift it up at several points like a superwoman, and duct-tape the tent fabric to the metal rail at the top supporting the tent to ensure there is no gap at the top. Raquel did a great job of being the superwoman!

The Game Starts

When the game started, Iba was our first MC. He had the cheat sheet we sent out the week before on his phone and did a really great job of hosting the first game. Below is a short video showing his and another game.

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Although the wind was very strong, and it was cold, we still had lots of fun on the day and everyone who participated in our game seemed to enjoy it. I especially liked seeing both the parents and kids get excited about the game and, in some cases, seeing them compete against each other. One kid continued to play after his first game and ended up playing 3 out of the 4 games that we had prepared. There were two families at least that divided into two teams and competed against each other. As with any project, there were things that can be iterated on and improved for the next time but overall despite the cold and the wind, Trash Trivia managed to be an engaging game.

Thank You!

Thanks Iba and Ailish for coming out to be with us despite the weather, and thank you Anezka and Tammy for the mini happy hour after the event!

P.S. Below is a short 2 min video summing up our experience! We plan to show this film during our LCCS presentation as well.

Welcome to Jersey, a beautiful land… park? Well, it was beautiful, although upon my first encounter: rainy, cloudy and cold. Especially the subsequent day once it was freezing cold and windy and constructing everything was taking long. So long. So did the deconstruction. But constructing it was much more of an effort than expected.

Fingernails busted, totally unprepared, late-nights at the school to finish wrapping up semester loose ends. Eventually leading up to a very windy and a cold day on which we had quite some fun constructing the dome once again. Think about it, if the wind blows and you’re constructing a dome that is lightweight, is made of wood and material that just carries wind, then it’s a bit of a problem isn’t it? With us repositioning the dome and trying to keep it steady in so many ways with sandbags, bags and other provisional material, it all came down to a satisfactory finish as it was raised and ready to go. I thought it would be a bit warmer within the dome at first but the wind was so strong that I really got stone cold and tired to the point I just took a sit and… fell asleep for a while.

In any case, eventually we managed to set up the projector and calibrate all to work properly. It took longer than expected to get it all up and running and so by noon, we decided to get it going, as the projection spanned across most of the Dome and the calibration seemed to have reached its limits, especially that incoming and exterior light remained an issue we had to combat in a variety of ways.

Oh, also I forgot to mention, we had bagels and coffee. Although I had donuts on my way to the spot.

Once it was all dun, I figured my watch has ended and so I decided to check on other tents and pass on the torch of other group members handling the operation. While it could feel a bit strange to do this way, I could just not simply remain in the same spot as I was reaaally cold. So I visited a few other tents, managed to eat some protein bars and pretty good tacos and then I realised that our dome was generating traffic. And that was a good sign. One that would remain as such up till the closing hours around 3, when our team kept on saying that we’re wrapping up but 10 more sessions took place as people just wanted to see it. Considering the mapping was for about 3 minutes and the tent would take about 10 people in-n-out, I would say about 500 people might have come across the projection mapping.

At a later stage I would inspect the dome and it look relatively good, the problem was the projection being skewed but the main components worked and made people in awe. I guess that’s the most satisfying part of all the work done in past weeks.

On April.27 – Our Big Day!

We finally finished our dome set up at noon, it was hard but fun to do teamwork! My favorite moment of Earth Day is the construction part, it was nice that Milo found a clipper so I can work fast. My least favorite part is the weather, the wind at Liberty State Park is extra cooler than Manhattan. I’m glad inside of the dome is warm, so we can better interact with visitors. At the end of the day, people were all ready to leave because the weather got cooler. However, we actually attracted more people by “yelling” in the end. During the show in the dome, I helped guide people into the dome and interact with kids. It was nice to see our Oceanic Odyssey project in public and see how strangers reacted after the experience. Most of the visitors were amazed by our idea of using different colors, and they also learned to not use plastic bags after seeing our underwater scenes.