By Cheryl Birch
Our two-day, ICT 25-year anniversary event was just starting, when several attendees and staffers asked if they could bring kids to see the demos on display.
These questions sparked the idea to host an ICT Demo Day for Kids and Teens event as a part of ICT’s 25-year activities.
Our researchers helped create a program of age-appropriate demos for our young guests, and our staff were eager to help out with the many logistics it takes to pull an event like this together.
Within a day of the invitation going out to the USC Viterbi friends and families, we had almost 100 attendees! The response was so overwhelmingly positive that we had to close the reservation line well before the event arrived.
On Demo Day, as our guests arrived, they enjoyed a robot demonstration while they ate from either the kid-focused or adult-focused buffets. From there, groups gathered around their respective docents who took them to visit five different labs/demos:
- Natural Language-focused Conversations with Heroes in History
- Mixed Reality Lab for the Virtual Ship Simulator, InVRse Tablet Reader, and TAR-AR: Pit 91 experience
- Drone demonstration with explanation that we use drones for terrain capture
- Mentor Pal, which enables subject experts to share career and education advice virtually
- Vision and Graphics Lab for learning about how digital double characters are created in the movies.
It seemed as if the three-hour event whizzed by, and, as our guests parted, each received an ICT-25 T-shirt. In addition to the shirt, our caterer created goodie bags for each of our young guests.
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THANKS TO….
It takes a village to pull off an event of this magnitude, and our Demo Day event was no exception!
From Shereen Lanzarotta and Mana Marashi, who, in addition to being excellent docents, provided significant support leading up to the event, along with Dhairya Parmar, who provided the artwork, Dava Casoni who provided the legal releases, IT team (Ramon Paz, Nasser Osorio and Cesar Otanez) who got demos moved and videos running, the Facilities team (Saul Leal, Kevin Watley, Jose Corza, and Rose Biedka) who filled in many random support and setup needs, and Bayley Camp, who provided support both leading up to and during the event.
Our team of Docents, Magi Gordon, Kevin Watley, and Anabel Franco-Huerta, in addition to Shereen and Mana, kept the groups together and running on time. Our amazing researchers provided the exhibits: Mohammad Soleymani, Kat Haase, David Traum/Alesia Gainer, Ben Nye/Joel Walsh, David Nelson/Rhys Yahata, and Mony Sea.
Casey Topar got the T-shirts delivered on time and the ever-changing catering order modified, and Lyneisha Brooks got the checks to the demo day video editor promptly!!
Our creative team got the photos and video done: Jennifer Stockert took the photos and video for our event, Christopher Fessenden edited the video, and Chris Kelly provided the narration. Even ChatGPT helped to make the video script special!
Everyone came together to provide an excellent event that inspired the 115 guests who were on site. Thanks so much!
The feedback to our event was extremely positive: young guests are eager to return, and our researchers are looking forward to repeating Demo Day next year.
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