Day 5

Gunn High School

We began the day by visiting Gunn Highschool, who also participates in the FRC, robotics competition and has some friendly rivalry against Palo Alto High School.

We were given a tour around the campus, which featured large quads, where students can have lunch and sit around, the training fields, where we witnessed a PE lesson and also the different classrooms, including workshops for building robots and woodwork, and large ICT and Computer Science classrooms filled with Macs to create a friendly atmosphere for the students to work in.

We learnt about basic algorithms in an program called Scheme, which calculated the Fibonacci sequence, however we realised the higher the number in the sequence, the longer it took the program to calculate.

At the end of the visit, we were fortunate enough to witness some Homecoming spirit, with lots of students of all ages, from freshmen to seniors, all participating and competing in games in the quad with an supportive audience, including us.

Microsoft

We then made our way to a Microsoft office, where we were treated with drinks and souvenirs, a Microsoft notebook and pen.

We were seated in a conference room with our speaker, Kenny Spade, who introduced us to his role in the company, which is managing The Garage, places in the company where employees can work on any project they want. Satya Nadella said the entire company should be like The Garage, he wanted people to be creative and build new things. Events, such as, the annual Hackathon, which allows people from the company to work on any project for a week, with the end product having a chance of being through a 'Shipping' process, where students review the product to decide whether or not the product will be released. The company recieves recommendations regarding their products monthly so they produce a list of these possible improvement areas and suggest the employees to either pick one from this list or one of their own.

We then had an exciting experience on the Microsoft Holo Lens, where users can put on the goggles and adjust the sizing on the ring around the goggles, the users can interact with the goggles using hand gestures, such as , clicking and opening objects in the augumented reality. We experienced interactions with dolphins and dinosaurs while using the goggles.

After the talk from Kenny, we had the chance to ask questions to a panel of employees who shared their experiences and knowledge with us, such as, how long they worked for Microsoft, their roles in the company and how they balanced their work life and social life, as they were all women.

Intel

Our last visit of the day was to the Intel Museum, where we were able to explore the museum in groups of more than 4 and had interesting experiences with the interactive exhibits there. For example, I got the chance to experience the procedure of a clean worker who deals with the microchips at Intel. The procedure included:

• Drink water

• Put on hair net

• Put on plastic hand gloves

• Put on plastic feet covers

• Put on overalls

• Put on feet overalls

• Put on goggles

• Put on head cover

• Put on hand covers

I also used the interactive exhibit which explained what binary is and I was able to spell out my name using binary.