We went to learn someone else's tool and left with a class to teach at ITBA

On 3 June, Google came to ORT for a hackathon: a talk on Google Vids and prompting, followed by a practical exercise in which each group had to make a video with the tool.

The activity did not go well for us. Google Vids did not work well on the Mac we were using, which made the practical part much harder.

What we did with the room instead

At the time, we were building Gemm Blocks: a visual editor for programming Unitree robots without writing ROS2. We were still working with the Go2 and had not yet landed on Gemm's refinery use case.

So we showed Gemm Blocks to the people running the session. That conversation ended with an invitation to teach a class about it at ITBA.

Ten days later at ITBA

On 13 June, Matías Tenenbaum and Guido Jacofsky took the Go2 to ITBA and ran an activity with students from the Robotito programme using Gemm Blocks. It was the first time people outside the team used the editor: an invitation from one event had become Gemm Blocks' first external validation.

What I take away

• The scheduled activity is not always the most valuable part of an event. The people in the room, and whether you have real work to show them, can matter more.
• Bring the work, not only its description. A project people can see and try opens a different conversation from the same idea on a slide.
• If I ran the next one: I would leave time for groups to show their own projects and make sure the main tool works across the laptops in the room.

Gemm Blocks stopped being the centre of Gemm once the refinery round became the real problem and the G1 arrived. The editor was not the final direction, but the class at ITBA showed that it had found a real audience.

More about Gemm Blocks in the lab.