Palm Beach Performance Assessment

Transcription

1 Palm Beach Performance Assessment Student's Name: Teacher's Name: School: Grade: Date: Circle Type and Score: Informative Argumentative Purpose, Focus, & Evidence & Elaboration Conventions Organization Unscorable FY18 Printing Grade 8 Prompt #84

2 Read the Inventors with a Vision passage set. Inventors with a Vision Source 1: Elements of Invention by Cliff Ransom As editor in chief of Popular Science, I get asked a lot of questions. Some of them are reasonable: Why is the sky blue? (Air molecules scatter blue light more effectively than red.) Some of them are not: Why can't I communicate with my cat? (Try listening.) But the most persistent question is, What does it take to become a great inventor? My typical response: If I had that kind of lightning in a bottle. I'd be drinking it myself. Besides good timing and even better luck, it's hard to pinpoint what makes certain inventors successful. They tend to be creative, exceptionally persistent and tolerant of risk. But beyond that, they are just people, and people come in all stripes. Tesla and da Vinci were ingenious. Steve Jobs was fastidious and business-minded. Thomas Edison was ruthlessly pragmatic; he was said to have set quotas for himself-a small breakthrough every 10 days and a big one every six months. The only thing that stands out about successful inventors is that they are exceptionally rare. And one of them is on our cover this month. In 2007, Bre Pettis, an artist and former schoolteacher, co-founded the hackerspace NYC Resistor. Its members wanted a 3-D printer, but the technology, which had been around since the 1980s, was expensive and its application, almost exclusively industrial. A few hackers started working with open-source designs. Pettis partnered with two of them, and they debuted their first consumer product, the CupCake CNC, in The invention became a business, MakerBot Industries, which Pettis sold four years later for around $400 million. He's now on to his next project, Bold Machines, a 3-D-printing workshop that helps artists and entrepreneurs transition quickly from rough ideas to working prototypes. "We basically accelerate the future," Pettis says. Every May, Popular Science publishes the Invention Awards, in which we celebrate the year's best independent inventions - those scrappy creations born of a garage or workshop, not an industrial lab. Who better to help us assemble that list than Bre Pettis? Together, we dug up some extraordinary awardees and Pettis shared his tips for aspiring inventors. He also graciously helped us 3-D print the Popular Science logo on the cover and uploaded the design files to Thingiverse.com so that you can print it too. No story about invention, however, would be complete without a caveat. Not all those featured will make it. Developing a successful prototype and developing a successful company are not necessarily the same skill. But all the ideas have tremendous potential, as do the inventors behind them. You never know. You just may see one of them on our cover one day. Ransom, Cliff. "Elements of invention." Popular Science May 2015: 6. General OneFile. Web. 23 Sept

3 Source 2: Excerpt from Total Immersion by Jerry Bellinson As a teenager Palmer Luckey was obsessed with building an unparalleled virtual-reality headset for gaming. At the age of 19 he succeeded, unveiling the first affordable system that would allow users to explore three-dimensional digital worlds. The Oculus Rift won support from an army of Kickstarter backers, attracted big-money venture capital, and turned Luckey into a rising rock star in the tech world. And then Facebook came calling. Palmer Luckey likes to go barefoot. However, when he met the men who would become his business partners in Oculus VR, a company that was recently sold to Facebook for $2 billion, he decided to wear flip-flops. It was an important meeting. This was in the summer of 2012, and he was 19 years old. Luckey was also wearing shorts and a T- shirt, and he was carrying a plastic bin. Inside were a tangle of wires, a small monitor mounted in a frame with a pair of inexpensive glass lenses attached, and a computer. It was a prototype for a head-mounted display, or HMD. The men, Brendan Iribe, Nate Mitchell, and Michael Antonov, were older than Luckey. They were gaming industry veterans who had worked together at Scaleform, a company that Iribe and Antonov founded, then sold. Once Luckey got his equipment working, the men took turns peering into it. What they saw was a barebones room with a short set of stairs. It appeared in 3D, and they could explore it by turning their heads to the right or left and by looking up or down. As they turned their heads, the picture moved, too. This was not the first head-mounted display for virtual reality, and it was not the best. For one thing, the image wasn't very clear. Users could see the individual pixels on the screen. If they moved their heads quickly, the image blurred. However, sophisticated virtual-reality systems were restricted to university, military, and industrial settings. They cost tens of thousands of dollars. Luckey believed he could sell his HMD to the public for under $500 and he was planning to run a Kickstarter campaign to fund the launch. He already had a name for the device. He called it the Oculus Rift. Last October, Palmer Luckey traveled to New York from his home in California as a winner in the annual Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awards. Luckey was now famous, and his company had received millions in venture capital funding. When he arrived, night had fallen. The cocktail party was being held on the 44th floor of the Hearst Tower, overlooking Central Park and the pixelated lights of midtown. Inside the room were champagne and passed hors d'oeuvres, suits and cocktail dresses, and displays of robots and autonomous UAVs. There was a line to try out the Oculus Rift demo. Luckey walked in alone. He was wearing jeans, a wrinkled gray shirt, and flip-flops. There are tech celebrities who deliberate over which ripped jeans and hoodie to wear to a formal event. Palmer Luckey is not one of those people. He is not pretentious. Arrogant, perhaps, if you consider it arrogant for a 19-year-old to build something that

4 upends an industry. Mainly, though, he is enthusiastic. He listens well. He is smart. He likes other people to feel smart, too. "Virtual reality is pervasive throughout our culture," Luckey told me. "Since we've had video games, people have dreamed of stepping into games. Movies like Tron and The Matrix and The Lawnmower Man are all based on this idea." But an affordable virtual-reality system wouldn't just benefit gamers. Architects are already using VR to step inside buildings that haven't yet been constructed. Doctors can perform virtual surgery before cutting a patient open. "We're focused on gaming to start because it's very demanding and it's a large market," Luckey said. "If we can make it good enough for gamers, then it's going to be good enough for a lot of other markets." [ ] Palmer Luckey was home-schooled. This gave him time to break things. As a young teenager, he cannibalized DVD burners for their laser diodes. He used them to build etching equipment. He got into a hobby called portablizing, rebuilding old video-game consoles to produce handheld gaming devices. His family lived in Long Beach, in Southern California. His father sold cars; his mother stayed home with Palmer and his three younger siblings. Palmer had a workshop in the garage and a part-time job at the U.S. Sailing Center of Long Beach, scrubbing decks, repairing boats, and doing grounds keeping. He raced dinghies. He briefly trained for a job rowing Venice-style gondolas for a company that provides canal tours. By the time he was 16, Luckey was an adept junkyard engineer, sifting through the detritus of electronics that languished in online auctions and liquidation sites. He launched a Web forum, ModRetro, devoted to portablizing, where he posted under the name PalmerTech. The members described their projects and traded tips on hardware hacks and where to source parts. In those old posts, Luckey comes across as an openhearted and enthusiastic site manager. He had a passion for the exchange of ideas that forums encourage. He showed a talent for organizing and motivating people, most of whom he'd never met face to face. [ ] In 2011, Luckey got a dream job working as a technician at the Mixed Reality Lab (MxR) at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). There, he had a chance to cross deep into VR territory. [ ] Throughout his time at MxR, Luckey continued to tinker on his own head-mounteddisplay project at home. By the spring of 2012, he was ready to make it public. Beilinson, Jerry. "Total Immersion." Popular Mechanics June 2014: 76+. General OneFile. Web. 23 Sept

5 Writing Prompt Directions for Writing: Write an article for your school s newspaper describing the skills and qualities that one needs to be a successful inventor. Your writing must be based on ideas and information that can be found in the Inventors with a Vison passage set. Manage your time carefully so that you can read the passages; plan your response; write your response; and revise and edit your response. Be sure to use evidence from multiple sources; and avoid overly relying on one source. Your response should be in the form of a multi-paragraph essay. Write your response in the space provided.

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