Archives 2021

BBBSLI – Raspberry Pi and Sphero Workshop

With great success at our STEM workshop at BBBSLI this past saturday, Bigs’ and Littles were able to learn about Raspberry Pi circuits and work with Sphero kits. We all worked as a team and had fun while we were learning how to program. It was a great experience to share our knowledge of SpringBoard incubators Inc. Shoutout to our corporate and event partners for making events like this possible.

Thanks to Instructor Will King for giving us great insight on how to conduct a Raspberry Pi Circuit. Thanks to instructors Tuly Reyes and Marilyn Castro for helping our Bigs’ and Littles learn how to code and program a Sphero. More importantly special thanks to BBBSLI for having us.

The animation industry truly began it’s “revolution” in the late 1960s when more and more animated films were produced and released in the public. You’d think it would be the “Walt-Era” when Disney films were being released as the years went by but so many other companies besides Disney were keeping up as well. Regardless, many people found opportunity to find jobs in the animation industry.

June 22^nd 1935 in Santa Barbara, California was the day the first African-American animator was born. His name is Floyd Norman. Currently 86 years old but still very active in the animation industry. What made him join the industry was him watching old Disney movie classics such as Bambi & Dumbo. Early in his career he started as an inbetweener or also known as“Tweenening” animator. This means when an animator adds frames so the final animation is more “smooth” and fluid. Eventually he moved on to work as key animator for notable motion pictures such as Disney’s Sleeping Beauty & Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians. He may have been an animator of color but he like many others had to start somewhere in the early and every growing industry.

Another few examples of African Americans in the animation industry are Frank Braxton who has done key animation for a handful of Charlie brown TV specials and LeSean Thomas who at first started off as an animator, in later years has opened his own animation studio in the eastern countries and created/produced & directed a handful of original anime series such as Cannon Busters & Yasuke. These men of African American decent have made their mark on the animation industry no matter the genre.

The second part of our workshop with BBBSLI will include the Raspberry PI. Here is another preview of the type of projects you can do with SpringBoard. If your organization is interested, please contact us at 516.414.2000. We (SpringBoard) put the fun in STEM Learning.

The Raspberry PI is a pocket computer. Yes, a really cool computer about the size of a credit card. For this project we will use the serial ports and a breadboard. Think of this as Engineering 101.

Raspberry Pi has a GPIO “General Purpose Input/Output” serial interface, that is composed of two parallel rows of metal pins. The GPIO provides an interface between the software and the physical world.

With these pins we can program the Raspberry Pi to interact with physical objects in the real world. We can receive signals from external sources such as a button or a device for measuring wind speed. We can also use it to control physical objects such as turning a light on and off or even operating a 3D printer. In this case The project you see in the photo below is the traffic light simulator.

After you learn how to connect the circuits on the breadboard, you will learn how to program the traffic light simulator in python. Pretty cool if you ask me. – By Tuly Reyes

Big Brother Big Sisters of Long Island’s mission is to “create and support one-on-one mentoring relationships that ignite the power and promise of youth.”

Big Brothers Big Sisters of Long Island provides children facing adversity with strong and enduring, professionally supported, one-on-one relationships that change their lives for the better, forever. To this end, BBBSLI has many different mentoring programs.

SpringBoard will be doing a STEM workshop for Bigs’ and Littles’ on September 25, 2021. I am very excited to be part of the team that will be teaching the workshops. So what will we be doing? Here is a preview.

My workshop is a gentle introduction to robotics. I will introduce the concept of autonomous robotics using the SPRK + robot. What can Bigs and Littles expect? They will work together to program our robot to do simple tasks, hence, autonomous robotics. It will be a great learning experience and I cannot wait. – by Tuly Reyes

Click Here to Learn more About BBBSLI: BBBSLI

I live in a suburban area in New York. I drive of course but most of the time I walk around the streets to my local pharmacy to pick up some essentials. As I do my afternoon cardio, I noticed around me empty buildings with signs that say “Rent” and a phone number displayed underneath. Next to the pharmacy, I take a small peak from the window, just to get a good look inside. I can’t help but think “You can definitely open an animation studio in there.”

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By Tuly Reyes & Chelsea Prudencio

As promised in our series, “A Data Science Story” this blog will provide insights into data from surrounding villages in Nassau County as it relates to Education and the Digital Divide. The data set was downloaded from the US Census for the following Villages: Rockville Centre, Freeport Village, Garden City, The Village of Hempstead, and Lynbrook.

Step 1: In Data Science terms, we “wrangled” the data. That means, remove blanks, and organize in a structure that we can use. We used Excel, and a nice trick to “transpose” the rows and columns, then saved it as a comma separated values (CSV).

Step 2: Next we need to explore the data. So we will use Google Colab. It is an excellent tool for data exploration and analysis, again in Data Science terms, this is EDA or Exploratory Data Analysis.

During our EDA, we noticed that “computer and internet access” were reported in percentages. And while the percentages looked good all around, we wondered what the impact would look like not in percentages but in terms of individual persons.

Data scientists are “big data” wranglers, gathering and analyzing large sets of structured and unstructured data. A data scientist’s role combines computer science, statistics, and mathematics.  Data scientists are in high demand. They analyze, process, and model data then interpret the results to create actionable plans for companies and other organizations.

“Data scientists are anomaly spotters”, said Dr. Steven C. Lindo, Chairman & CEO of SpringBoard Incubators Inc. Meaning that they follow a technique for Exploratory Data Analysis (or EDA). This method uses data visualizations techniques to look for outliers in datasets.

At SpringBoard, our Data Science workshops use the Python programming language for data analysis. We use it natively or with platforms like Google Colab or Jupyter IPython.

Python is perfect for scientific computing, here are the main components you will learn to use at SpringBoard:

• Basic Python: Basic data types (Containers, Lists, Dictionaries, Sets, Tuples), Functions, Classes
• Numpy: Arrays, Array indexing, Datatypes, Array math, Broadcasting
• Matplotlib: Plotting, Subplots, Images
• Pandas: Data analysis methods and tools.
• IPython or Colab: Creating notebooks, Typical workflows

Our next blog in “A Data Science Story” will use these tools to provide insights into census data from surrounding villages in Nassau County.

Knowledge is understanding gained through learning or experience. You read a recipe to gain knowledge about baking rhubarb pie. When it burns in the oven, experience gives you the knowledge that you need to stop doing three things at once. Fields like biology, math, art, medicine, and others have huge bodies of knowledge. Knowledge can mean information and also deeper understanding. You can use this word as a disclaimer too, as in “To my knowledge, my sister walked the dog.” – source https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/knowledge

Learning leads to awareness but the most important thing is the knowledge that we gain. The definition of knowledge above, can be summarized this way. Awareness.

Today we have a very advanced technology at our finger tips. If we need some type of information we can quickly find it online. We also have the ability to read, communicate, ask, and above all discover to do something new every day.

I want to learn because …

I want to be a person full of knowledge. I want to continue learning until I can’t no more! I want to able to help other people and to continue sharpening my reasoning and problem solving skills. Thanks to Dr. Steven Lindo for his teachings, for motivating us and, for being a fantastic person. Make the most out of your summer and learn!

By Tuly Reyes

Un torneo de innovación es una competencia por equipos donde los estudiantes se reúnen para enfocarse en un problema específico. Nuestro torneo de innovación fue organizado por SpringBoard Incubators Inc en asociación con Sean John del 4 al 5 de junio de 2021.

El tema fue Justicia Social, y se nos pidió que brindemos soluciones desde nuestra perspectiva a problemas como:

• La discriminación racial
• Sesgo de sexualidad y género
• Brecha salarial
• Bienestar infantil
• Trabajo infantil forzoso
• Abuso y negligencia infantil
• Pobreza e injusticia económica
• Falta de recursos
• Calidad de vida Sistema educativo
• Cuidado de la salud

A la competencia asistimos estudiantes de las escuelas: Hempstead High School, Roosevelt Middle School, West Hempstead y Sewanhaka High School.

La competición duró dos días. El primer día fuimos juzgados por nuestras ideas y nuestros bocetos. El segundo día tuvimos que proporcionar un “prototipo en el que se puede hacer clic” y justificar nuestra solución.

Como incubadoras SpringBoard, los estudiantes tuvieron el privilegio de poder participar y trabajar con otros estudiantes. Aprendimos de nuestros entrenadores y mentores a medida que interactuamos con expertos de la industria y recibimos el aliento de los jueces. Fue una experiencia técnica interesante, informativa y práctica. ¡Sobre todo nos divertimos! Divertido aprendiendo cosas nuevas como crear un prototipo de aplicación, colaborar en equipo y crear soluciones en iniciativas educativas, compromiso cívico y liderazgo. ¡Todos deberíamos innovar, colaborar y crear!

Muchas Gracias a Dr. Steven Lindo y todos los que participaron en este torneo, fue experiencia grandiosa porque aprendimos a innovacion sobre problemas que estan pasando actualmente.

“Club de Computación” de las escuelas secundarias de Hempstead aprovechando al máximo su verano

Las primeras semanas de las vacaciones de verano para los adolescentes se pasan idealmente de compras, yendo a la playa y con la familia. Sin embargo, este no es el caso del “Computer Club” de Hempstead High School. El Computer Club se enfrentó al desafío de codificar la tecnología E.R.R.S.E.L.A. de el Instituto de Tecnología de Nueva York. (Robot de investigación ETIC para actividades de aprendizaje y participación de los estudiantes). A pesar de no tener experiencia en codificación, el grupo de jóvenes tuvo que afrontar la abrumadora tarea de forma remota a través de ZOOM.

E.R.R.S.E.L.A. es un robot desarrollado por el Instituto de Tecnología de Nueva York con el único propósito de desarrollar las habilidades y la disciplina para poder colaborar y participar en E.R.R.S.E.L.A. ‘ funcionalidad y diseño. Trabajando con E.R.R.S.E.L.A. el Computer Club adquirió conocimientos del mundo real sobre áreas relacionadas con la ingeniería y la ciencia de la computación.