Week 5 Day 5

We met this morning with a professor and some grad students from UAEM in Toluca, Mexico. Pretty interesting conversation. Apparently all of the major universities in Mexico have a network of high schools that they are associated with. They are not exactly feeder schools, but there is definitely a link. Also, the north and central districts of Mexico are going paperless and moving to iPad-based learning. I would be interested to see how they will implement that program since that definitely won't be cheap. One thing that was a little surprising was how rigid the education system in Mexico seem to be. There is no possibility of earning duel credit during high school. In fact, if you are in a bachelors program you can not do anything to earn credit towards a masters. If your degree plan is supposed to take 4 years and your finish in three... you have a year to cool your heals before you get your degree and can move up to a masters. The group that came here was primarily working in the social sciences but there was a fair bit of discussion about our aquatics project because there is a big push in Toluca right now around water quality.

That absorbed pretty much the entire morning. When we came back we all got to work starting the wrap up for this project. We discussed the goals of our paper over lunch and revised our intent a little bit. Yixin is working up the schematics for our circuits so that others could replicate our work. Joe completed our poster and it looks great! (Notice the QR code? Pretty nifty, right? It was Lori's idea.) 

On the hardware front, Yixin acquired four of the five antennae we need to install on the boxes for the WSN. One thing we noticed was that the signal strength through the Otter Boxes was extremely degraded. To eliminate that problem we are installing external antennae which should boost our range.

The fish are still doing their thing. To prove some of them are alive I snapped some picks of fish playing in the tanks and riffles.

In other news, the Loftek camera is up and running and can be controlled via cell phone. Sadly, the response time isn't great and the resolution is not good enough to make out the small fish against the gravel background. The concept is solid, though, and it is a promising start for the project next year.