FlipCon14 Reflections - The Fun Stuff (take 2)

We're going to see if I can get the pictures to actually show up and tell the story this time!

*Thanks to Christina Seigel, Cara Johnson, Doug Ragan, Ken Bauer and Lindsay Cole (and many others on Twitter) for sharing their pictures in the FlipCon shared picture folder and helping me to tell the story of the conference in this post...              

Well, I've finally made it back from my journey across the country for my first "In-Person" FlipCon... and it was a blast!  I think part of my excitement was simply meeting so many from my PLN face to face for the first time.  We played a "Bingo" game that I quickly went crazy on and hunted everyone down to meet them.  Out of the 25 people on the BingoBoard, there were 15 I had never interacted with outside of Twitter before.  And, there were a LOT of people NOT on the BingoBoard I was privileged to meet. (P.S. If you took a picture with me and haven't yet put it in the shared pic folder yet, please do so - I want to include them here!)

My completed Bingo Board!  I had everyone but Eric Marcos the first night... and then found
 myself sitting right in front of him at Troy and Rob's Peer Instruction Session!

This blog post is all about the fun, hanging out, and collaboration!  I'm working on another one with the sessions that will be finished sometime soon...
[I am usually a rampant picture taker, but after I got Bingo I kind of just let everyone else take the pics... so I am still waiting for some pictures to be shared so I can add them to this post :)... hint hint!]

I decided to make a collaborative FlipCon14 picture folder, so you can see some of the exciting happenings and lots of selfies here.  I'll pick out some of my favorites to put in the blog post below.

 So, let's see...

I flew in on Monday and met up with Heather Witten in Colorado for my layover.  It was quite entertaining telling our third seatmate (as we were talking up a storm) that we had never actually met face to face before and we only knew each other thru Twitter.  Some people just don't understand...

We got into Pittsburgh, which I learned is not spelled Pittsburg, and drove 30 minutes to the lovely Cranberry Township to our hotel.   The conference was held at Mars Area High School, about another 10-15 minutes down the highway.

Jon, aka "Flipping Physics" himself!

The first event was the Opening Reception, which was thankfully held at our hotel so we didn't have to travel anywhere.  I had just gotten sick the weekend before, so I was starting off the conference a little under the weather but the excitement kept me going.  Here are a few non-Bingo pictures from the reception:

Awesome Panoramic Picture

And all of us looking at the awesome panoramic picture...

Lindsay, Me, Audrey, Heather

After the reception, the town of Mars closed down their main road and invited us in. 

	(Just a little excited that #FlipCon15 is in Michigan...)

We got to meet the Mayor of Mars

I guess this was the biggest thing to happen in Mars in 17 years, because there was a newspaper reporter there!

You can read a different online article here.  And ANOTHER article here!

The Mayor of Mars even came to the conference on Tuesday and declared it FlipCon14 Day!

Both days at lunch we got to sign books!  That's right, Jon and Aaron's new book, of which several of us got asked to write a chapter for, was released at FlipCon14!  You can purchase the book from Amazon here.

Tuesday night we had an event at the Carnegie Science Center.  There was a ton to check out but we ended up chatting most of the time instead of exploring.  Oh well!

And just acting like a robot...

And basketball against a robot...

Playing Air Hockey against a robot... I did score once!

I'm an astronaut!

Trying to find your way home in a different city in the dark in the rain while trying to text with your husband and skype with your son is not very fun...  Plus the fact that 10 power lines fell over due to the storm right outside our hotel and the exit was closed so we couldn't make it back until we circle around the city lost for quite a while... Oh, and that the exit was then closed for the next 2 days while they were still working on it!

  What better way to end the conference than a dinner out with everyone left?  Most people flew out Wednesday night (or attempted to...), but those of us leaving Thursday enjoyed an evening at LongHorn Steakhouse before departing... Until Next Year...

A few random pics from conference fun: