February’s project feature is a mysterious animated short that explores the types of creatures that live in the depths of the ocean. Ninth graders Cole K. and Siena J. created Into the Deep, a documentary-like animated short exploring the midnight zone of the ocean and the unique creatures that inhabit it.

Building on the technical and conceptual experience gained from the first part of this studio series, Cole and Siena worked together to construct, animate, and edit a visual campaign informed by a natural event or phenomena. They were tasked with exploring current global issues they found compelling, and produced the final animated short with workflows from a variety of 2D and 3D softwares, including Blender, After Effects, Houdini, and DaVinci Resolve.

The deep-sea is relatively unknown and unexplored. “Into the Deep” aims to educate people on the wonders of this vast and unknown world. Due to lack of sunlight and other essential resources most creatures would need to survive, the life that inhabits the deep sea has developed unique traits in order to flourish. Animals like the yeti crab use arms covered in hairs to sift for bacteria in the water, while the angler fish uses bioluminescence to lure its prey closer.

Early research looked at what types of life could survive around 2100 meters below sea level - the midnight zone - and what unique traits they have gained that help them survive. Learning about eating habits and general behavior helped to better understand the creatures that are animated in this short. The team hopes to educate the audience about just a few of the wonders that live deep below the surface.

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We spent the day at the new Media Lab playing with the drawdio kit which was designed by Jay Silver, a PhD student at the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the ML. The movie below was created by Nobuyuki Ueda who is a visiting professor at the ML.

Eric started the day by showing a little bit about Scratch and the PicoBoard. The students were asked to design musical instruments which they could interact with using their body.

After that, students jumped to the table to prototype their ideas.

Here is Nicky and Eric celebrating after figuring out how to connect the resistors

Harrison testing his design

Julian and Hayley presenting their project



Vanessa and Diallo

Since we have a limited supply of Hydrogen, Jeff has been experimenting with Hydrogen. Here are some early calculations to figure out how many aluminum cans are needed to produce enough gas to fill the balloon. (33.8 aluminum cans fills a 5-foot balloon)

Ready to generate hydrogen

Aluminum beginning to bubble

And some Hydrogen

Today we started our interactive music studio which is taught by

Eric showed how to record/edit music using

Julian and Nicky knocking at the window.

Jake and Dialo recording the interesting voices their music teacher is making

Jake and Dialo are starting to edit their music in GarageBand. Tomorrow morning we will be reviewing/sharing what the students created.

Yesterday we had our final review for the Balloon Studio.

Early in the morning, we packed our stuff and headed to Boston Harbor. Wind was around 7 m/h, which is good for the balloon. First we had to carry the balloon all the way down through the parking garage. Four of us were protecting the balloon because we did not want it to hit the ceiling and explode.

Getting ready for the launch

And here are some images from the sky





The images above were actually the only ones that were not blurry. The wing was torn apart and that caused lots of turbulence. We need to do a better job with stabilizing the camera.

and here are two blurry images



And finally, we tried to launch the kite but we forgot the tail

We had a very eventful and exciting day. As part of the "Alternative Energy" studio, we visited a few of MIT energy-related programs. We started by visiting the CO-GENENERATION plant, then we talked with Nick Gayeski, a PhD in Building Technology about his research. we capped the day by visiting the Fusion Center.

The combustion turbine

Very complicated inside!

The control room

We spent the next hour at Nick's lab talking about his dissertation research on low-lift cooling technologies. His research is done in collaboration with MASDAR, a new city in Abu Dhabi that will rely entirely on solar energy and other renewable energy sources, with a sustainable, zero-carbon, zero-waste ecology. Nick's research focuses on the consumption side. Since the climate in Abu Dhabi is very hot, most of the energy goes into cooling the buildings. As his research indicates, the potential of low-lift cooling savings is as much as 75% of cooling energy. To achieve this, Nick is using multiple technologies, such as variable speed chiller, radiant cooling, monitoring with system identification, and optimal predictive control.

For the afternoon session, we visited the

The crane that is used to take apart the reactor before every experiment

The heavy door that separates the reactor from the rest of the building

The monitor room

To boost our energy, we bought some dry ice to play with.





After playing around, we decided to do an art project with the dry ice. We mixed some yellow paint with the water and added the dry ice. Unfortunately, the bottle was too strong and did not explode. we will do more experiments tomorrow.