School Festival 2022 | Hibiki Ikenoue

Overview

At the 2022 school festival, the first held normally in three years, I rebuilt the robotics club’s exhibition from the ground up as club president. Visitor numbers reached nine times the pre-COVID-19 level, the exhibit was rated highly in both the exit survey and the judging, and it won the Best Exhibition Award.

Activity log

The overhaul began with a close reading of past visitor surveys. The reason people left partway through was written there plainly: the exhibits were too technical to keep following. The members’ wish to show off their technology had drifted apart from what visitors came hoping to enjoy. So I proposed to the members that we rebuild the exhibition by working backwards from the visitor’s experience.

A live booth colorizing black-and-white photos with a GAN

For the theme, we chose AI. The festival opened two weeks before OpenAI released ChatGPT. Generative AI had not yet swept through the public conversation, but we saw where the field was heading and built the program to explain machine learning and deep neural networks while running real robots alongside.

The exhibition room, with the visitor flow unified into a single route

Preparation was one debate after another. From selecting the theme down to how each exhibit should be presented, we talked everything through with the members repeatedly. To give our methods a grounding, we sent members to trade shows and museums and I visited them myself, studying visitor flow and display technique. Out of that work came the club’s official characters and an audio guide, with a route designed so the characters lead visitors through the exhibits.

The tutorial corner at the entrance, explaining how to read the posters and use the audio guide Preparation work

Sorting audio guide equipment during preparations RoboCup explainer booth

The RoboCupJunior explainer booth

The production itself was substantial. Fifty club members produced more than sixty posters, and I directed the whole effort.

Poster draft explaining the definition of AI ELIZA poster

Column poster on ELIZA and the Turing test Transformer poster

Advanced poster on applications of the Transformer

Poster draft explaining neural networks Colorization poster

Poster draft on colorizing black-and-white images

Repairing the stage equipment

My contribution went beyond the club’s own exhibit to the festival as a whole. A QR-code visitor management system I wrote in Python was used across the entire festival, making it possible to count visitors and track improvements against the numbers. Backstage, I also served as the repair hand for the festival’s stage equipment.

At the Best Exhibition Award ceremony

On the day, visitor numbers at the robotics club’s exhibit reached nine times the pre-COVID-19 level. Both the surveys and the judging were favorable, and the exhibition won the Best Exhibition Award.

Tallied visitor survey results for the exhibition sessions I ran Exit survey tally

Exit survey results rating the measures we introduced

Free-form responses from the survey

A group photo of all members after the award ceremony

The Best Exhibition Award certificate

The same club with the same technology drew nine times the audience once we worked backwards from the visitor in deciding how to present it. That number shook me. What decided the outcome was less the technology than the division of roles, the management of progress, and the habit of tracking improvement in numbers. I apply this experience as club president directly to running my company today.