I can’t believe there’s only one more week until we leave for Malta! We’ve done a lot in the past couple of weeks to prepare. Yesterday, the whole Cal Poly team went to practice flying the ROV at the pool. It was great to get more experience setting up the ROV, which I hadn’t done before. I also got to practice driving it around the pool, while other people traded off taking sonar scans and Erik recorded the bearing, time, depth, and sketched out the pool based on the scans. Of course, it will be a lot more difficult when we’re in Malta and we can’t see the ROV when it’s in the cistern!
I’ve spent this past few weeks working on the Water Ways website. We are still waiting on the permanent server but for now we are using Omeka’s premium package to host the site temporarily. This means that we have to use one of Omeka’s “themes” for the layout and design of the site, and have extremely limited authority to change it. But, I was able to pick a good theme to match our projects goals. Although we still don’t have everything up, we have a great start.
The first step: finalizing the logo! With the input of the rest of the team and months of deciding, I finally settled on this final logo design:
Along the top of the website is the horizontal primary navigation bar. It has pages about the site, about our partners, our research, teaching resources, and a contact page.
About the site: I put information here about the “Water Ways” site, like why we are examining the relationships between water, society, and technology and why these topics help determine the future of the Mediterranean. I also put information about ICEX and the great experience it creates for engineering students to get practice working in a foreign country.
Partners: Here I listed the sponsors: National Science Foundation (NSF) and Collaborative Research Experiences for Undergraduates (CREU), and how their goals coordinate with our program goals.
Research: Right now, I have the research broken up into three groups: Data collection, Interpreting data, and 3D cistern visualizations. Inside data collection users can explore students at work, sites we visit, or the ROV sonar scans. Inside the 3D cistern visualizations, they can explore 5 different cisterns that we have collected data and created visualizations out of. Vanessa took screenshots from different views of her WebGL cistern visualizations to display on the website.
Teaching Resources: still under construction. Vanessa and I are currently working on the first Educational Module that will go here, which will be a two-lesson plan for 7th-8th grade Social Studies classes, incorporating Maltese water conditions in the past, present, and future.
The website is no where near complete, but we have a great start to showcase some of the work we’ve done so far. I’ll be working on it more, and will have a lot to add after I actually visit Malta next week!
Here's a screenshot of the homepage, which has featured and recent items posted. Check out the website here: icex.omeka.net
-Amanda
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