VITAL Summer Camp 2019

The theme for the 2019 VITAL Summer Camp was “Mind SAFETY. Avoid SHOCKing Experiences”. The camp was organized at the Moss and Associates Built Environment Informatics Lab in collaboration with Dr. Mario Eraso, STEM Coordinator at the School of Computing and Information Sciences. Sudip Subedi, PhD student at Moss School of Construction, Infrastructure and Sustainability led the instruction. Students from Felix Varela Senior High, G. Holmes Braddock Senior High, MAST Academy, Miami Dade Online, Pinecrest Glades Academy, Ransom Everglades and Coral Reef High School participated in the summer camp.

The format of the class was similar to previous summer camps where the students learned about the basic concepts of coding and virtual reality in the first week and were exposed to a project-based learning environment in the second week.

Since the theme was “Mind SAFETY. Avoid SHOCKing Experiences”, the students were supposed to produce an interactive game that teaches the players about electrical hazards in day-to-day life and how to prevent a fall. The students were free to choose the scenario for their projects. Besides promoting public and occupational safety among youngsters, the camp was designed to teach computer programming, 3D modelling and creating animations to the students.

Below are sample projects created by the students with different scenarios. The video shows one instance of the game. In the actual game, the players move their characters and when the characters avoid/get into hazards, text appears on the screen with lessons on how to improve their performance.

Due to continued heavy raining, there is a water leak in a basement under repair process. Now the basement is flooded, where few live naked wires are exposed to the wet floor creating electrical hazard. The electrician most avoid the wet floor and find his way to the fuse box to disable it, which will cut-off the electricity and the exposed wires can be repaired.

An alien spaceship has just crashed into a jungle in this severe weather. The lone survivor alien is stuck in the middle of the jungle, confused and disoriented. And, the spaceship has damaged some high-tension electrical poles causing a huge electrical hazard in the area. The alien must find his escape pod avoiding all electrical hazards before enemies find him and encage him.

The electrical transformer has sustained a damage after lightening hit it. Now the whole neighborhood has gone dark. An electrician has arrived to fix the problem but due to the heavy rainfall and lightening, he is having difficulty communicating with his base station. So, he must trust his skills and experience as an electrician, climb up the pole with live wires and damaged transformer, figure out the problem and fix it without getting electrocuted.