Bytes & Bites: Bytes & Flights

As an Engineering Student Ambassador, we assist the College of Engineering to increase recruitment and upliftment of their students through various events. Some of these events include outreach to students K-12, tours of the College of Engineering at UHM, student, facaulty, alumni, and industry partner events, etc. I personally co-lead a string of events called “Bytes & Bites” which essentially are technical workshops aimed to expose engineering students to campus resources and nurture student connections across all grade levels. Each event has a Engineering discipline theme, for “Bytes & Bites x SCADA LAB: Bytes & Flights”, we teamed up with Professor Mark Nelson to educate the students about Computer Engineering.

This event hosted about 30 - 40 students, and just like all of the other events, it requires lots of planning and prepping. For this one specifically we had to manually prep all of the Raspberry Pis by adding them through the passthrough, updating the OS system, tracking and testing all the Pis and other equipment like the antenna, planning the layout/power source, food venue, etc. This event was held up on the 4th floor of Holmes Hall and started with a quick talk by Dr. Paul Schmitt PhD then followed by the lecture and activty by Professor Nelson. The students used their own computers to ssh into the Raspberry Pis, learned different terminal commands, and began tracking the different flights and actually being able to see these planes since we were at the top of Holmes Hall. The coolest thing aboout this lab was the students got to take home the Raspberry Pis and other equipment for their own personal use! The only catch is they need to follow up with us about a year or so after with what they ended up using the Pi for. Huge thank you for the SCADA Lab for their help especially Professor Mark Nelson who not only gave a lot of his time to plan and prep for this event but also donating some of his own equipment for the students to take home. This event would truly not have been so great without him. Though these events can be strenuous to put on, it is always so rewarding to see this community of engineering students coming together, having fun, eating food, getting exposed to opportunities that the college provides, all while still learning and typically getting to take home a souviner to rember it all by.

You can learn more at the Bytes & Bites at UH Mānoa.