This past weekend, we attended the Take Flight for Kids event. In this event, several community organizations gathered in a single, dense conglomeration at the Ried Hillview Airport in San Jose, California. Wondering where the name comes from? Take Flight for Kids is a day-long ‘festival’ of sorts where volunteer pilots take mentally disabled children on flights in thier very own planes! The event had several volunteer community bands, as well as a bunch of cool booths, like a steampunk mail service and a blue-shirted group of robotics demonstrators…
After arriving on the airport’s dusty fields, the EHVS Robotics team unpacked thier things and set up camp on the field. Suddenly, without warning, a chair flew overhead at near relativistic speeds and nearly tore a hole in the space-time continuum! Wait…wront event. Instead, the team decided to help set up the tables and chairs. While it was tiring for the team members to tread back and forth in the giant dustbowl, they felt warm and cozy on the inside afterward…mostly.
After getting kicked off of the field and onto the parking lot, the day really began. People started arriving, exhibitors began exhibiting, and the opening ceremony was about to begin. After shooting off the Bellagio of Diet Coke and Mentos with the Oak Grove team, the EVHS team headed back to thier booth, ready to take on anyone who came by.
Exhibiting alongside the EVHS Prototypes were the Leland Robotics Team, the Insomniacs and the Apes of Wrath. For their amusement, the Apes of Wrath brought along with them their robot chair. Essentially, the device was a lazy-boy recliner with two joysticks attached to its arm rests as controls. While it was an interesting diversion for the bystanders, the real meat of the booth was in the robots themselves.
After a few hours of presentation, the team rolled out to go get lunch. The place provided free lunch of burgers and hot dogs, which came in very handy when we were in need of food. The only real problem that we encountered was the endless mounts of vitamin water. Although some shop ‘generously donated’ several hundreds of flats of vitamin water, they failed to inform us that all of it was expired. Luckily, the drinks were only a few days expired, and the team only had a few anyway…although that would explain how we suddenly got super powers…
All in all, the event was enjoyable, and even a little bit productive. Some of the cooler things were:
~Foot-pump action porto-sinks (next to the not-so-foot-pumped-porto-potties)
~California Insect Bots, a neat little organization that sports small but deadly remote controlled robots that go around trying to launch the other bot into a discard bin
~A LEGO jeep! Some (incredibly intelligent and handsome) guy decided to glue a bunch of lego boards on his jeep and deck it out with bricks!
Live long and prosper! c\\//
-Jeffrey Yu