Friday, May 13 Cricket!

Hi All,

We had a bright and early start to our day this morning. We were at the school by 7am for our Cricket match! Over the next two hours we learned the basics of the game (cricket has over 200 rules…) in order for us to be successful as we played against the female students of BCA. Cricket has a few key differences from baseball/softball —firstly, the bowler that “pitches” the ball usually bounces the ball at the batter; secondly, the batter’s swing is more like the second-half of a golf swing because it goes from low-to-high. Many of the other rules get really detailed, so feel free to watch videos from youtube (can try to post one when I have better wifi). Thanks to the crazy amazing batting skills of Heather and Michaella, in 10 overs we scored 60 runs and were able to beat BCA by a narrow 3 run margin. It was quite a fun experience! Since Umich plans on making the North Campus Grove a “destination”, can we add cricket to the construction plan? Maybe a SWE intramural cricket team is in order??

Today was the last day of the regular camp that we taught at BCA. The main activities of the day included a project about alternative energy/ energy conversion, more specifically wind turbines. We also had a presentation about all the engineering disciplines taught at Umich for the students to have a greater understanding of how the projects throughout the camp have been directly related to one or more engineering fields. Additionally, we continued to work with Lego Mindstorms and explore the intricacies of implementing loops into code. While I am not a CS major, it was a lot of fun to work with the students as they worked on creating, implementing, and testing their code on the robots. The students were so excited to work with the robots and their faces lit up with each challenge we gave them. Working with the BCA students has made me extremely excited to volunteer at more outreach activities with SWE in the Fall. 

This afternoon we had a cultural exchange between U of M SWE students and BCA students. After working on our Indian dance performances for the last month or so, we finally presented our final performance to the BCA students and staff. Following our dances we also sang and performed the “Cup Song” from Pitch Perfect, and finished off our show with a resounding chorus of “The Victors.” There was a reason that SWE at U of M went first for this cultural exchange; that reason is because the BCA students are EXTREMELY talented! A few groups of students did classical Indian dance, and musical ensembles continued with various combinations of traditional Indian instruments. One thing that stuck with me from the introduction to this exchange was a brief explanation of why it is important to have such a cultural exchange in order to more completely understand each other’s culture in order to further improve future collaborations.