Hello, my name is Jason Perry and this is my website. I encourage you to explore it, your local environment and the world in general.
By way of introduction I am happy to be known as a citizen scientist, an engineer, a maker of things and a farmer’s son. I love boats and I love being in, on or near the ocean. More importantly I am also the father of two daughters with curious minds.
My desire to “see under sea” started when I was a child myself. This desire became a passion when I completed an advanced open water dive qualification on the Great Barrier Reef more than 25 years ago.
Gadgets and things were making their way underwater however high definition video streaming was still more than a decade away for most of us. Getting wet was all part of the fun.
As technology advanced and high resolution digital cameras became readily available, a community of underwater explorers started building and operating remotely operated underwater vehicles or ROVs. These little robots could dive deeper, stay down longer and swim faster than I could. These little devices could do things that I just couldn’t…or wouldn’t…or shouldn’t.
After purchasing one of these ROVs I soon found myself surrounded by other curious minds that were eager to know more.
Parents and teachers started telling me of their concerns and their challenges in getting kids interested in STEM…funnily enough as their children were lining up and sometimes jostling to control an advanced underwater robot in three dimensions with no direct line of sight that was exposed to external forces created by laws of physics acting through the natural environment all with the help of high grade ex-military technology used to display live video and telemetry on a virtual controller using state of art computer coding…but with nothing to do with STEM according to the children!
And so the idea began…