On Friday, 3rd of March, Lorcan Tuohy Donnelley, Elena Mackey and Rachel O’Dwyer with their teacher Miss Fogarty went to Facebook in Dublin. We went on this trip as part of the School Digital Champions programme. At first, we got to use oculus virtual reality headsets. This allowed us to immerse ourselves into a virtual world, e.g. just outside the space station in outer space, in a haunted house or walking in the Alps. Afterwards, we sat down and listened to a presentation on the ambitions of Facebook, “to make the world more connected”. They talked to us about new technological innovations and new creative ways in which Facebook could be used. A few examples they gave us included in the event a natural disaster, a person could use Facebook to quickly contact the person they’re worried about and say ” Are you okay?”, “Yeah” and feel relieved. This was more effective than just trying to call the person. Another new innovation is for the visually impaired. They can now engage in the pictures on Facebook as they are described to them by a voice on Facebook. For example, they could click on an image, and the voice would then read out ” this image contains two people smiling, hills, trees, Sky”.
After the presentation, they divided students from various schools into groups. Our challenge was to think of new creative innovations, ways to receive and send out information and to design a control room in which this information would be received. An idea that my group had was to use the oculus headsets to virtually engage with the information and to see different charts and to examine this information in a new way. Other ideas included using Facebook to question people and get their opinions on new topics in short questionnaires, and to join all that information together. Afterwards, we were taken on a tour of Facebook. They showed us plans for a drone that would provide Internet and replace telephone wires. It would fly around for 3 months, using solar power. It would store this energy up and use it at night. They took us to a wall, where we could write our signatures on it. Their workplace was very colourful and had a relaxed atmosphere. I think it would be a lovely place to work. They also had a machine that could determine the size of your target audience. You would put in your specifications such as Males, 30-50 years of age, living in Europe etc and it would show you the number of people who fit that category on Facebook. You would then know how many people you could gather information from. All your data on Facebook is being used for good purposes.
Our visit to Facebook definitely helped us on our project and provided us with an insight into future careers in technology.
(Rachel O’ Dwyer)
