On Tuesday, it was now time to go back to Hangzhou and our time in Suzhou had ended after a relaxing yet exciting journey exploring parts of China.
On Thursday, it was the start of another day of lessons from our design fiction course. This time we took our stories one step further from just simple storyboarding to creating a short 15sec animation of how to make toast from our drawings. It was quite enjoyable and enriching experience of learning and experimenting to create our own short animation. It was also very interesting to see how everyone told a different story with very different animation styles despite being taught the same things. It just shows that everyone really has a unique way of thinking.
After class, we went for a demonstration of the various projects the students and researchers have done here at Zhejiang University. I was very impressed by one of the projects that leveraged the power of big data to do a variety of things. The project complied many forms of traffic data such as traffic density and path taken by vehicles to find solutions for billboard advertising companies depending on their requirements and constraints. They were also able to use this form of technology to find lost items by passengers in taxis by tracking and predicting the exact taxi it was lost in based on the user information such as the time of the ride and path taken by the passenger. I was a bit unsettled as it seemed like this type of technology only existed in movies a decade ago but now it is slowly becoming reality. The power and consequences of this type of technology will certainly grow in the coming years and it will no doubt have a large impact on society in the decades to come.
On Friday, it was time to start our community service project in China and we began the project with a tour of the school with 吴老师. We learned a little bit about the humble beginnings of the school when it started in the 1980s till the present day followed by a tour of the facilities of the school.
I was impressed by how well the school had used the space that they had with so many different rooms used to cater and teach the students in the school. They tried their best to emulate the real world and create a safe and realistic environment for the students to learn. 吴老师 also explained that their goal was to teach these children to become independent and be able to integrate into society, this was a cause I could really get behind and respect and it invigorated me to try to do more for this project.
