Classroom HackSpaceChallenge/Report/1

Update has been posted.

Brief

Introduce your team (video would be a great way to do this), explain your hackerspace’s philosophy, and provide a top level summary of your first week

Draft

Testing, testing.... Is thing on? Ladies and Gentleman, let me welcome you to London Hack Space's (or London Hackspace or perhaps Londonhack Space) Global Grand Hackspace Challenge project blog.

Let me introduce, myself, your blog writer for today, eb4890, aka Will.

It has been a busy week at London Hackspace. We instituted the 24 hour rule on Tuesday, which meant that if 24 hours went by without any discussion of the project then the project with the most votes would be picked. The projects discussed in the following 27 hours were an Opensource Spectrometer and open source buzzer system to allow children to give feedback to the teacher. We finally settled on the buzzer project.

That accomplished we swiftly set about doing some initial designing. We are designing it via wiki.

http://wiki.hackspace.org.uk/wiki/Classroom_HackSpaceChallenge/Buzzers

Details are tenuous, but we are thinking of a 4 button dumb buzzer system, with multiple of them wired to a hub, this then talks wireless-ly with a teachers terminal that is connected to a computer.

Follow us on github to see the code/designs as it happens.

I also had an interesting time trying to Skype on my mobile phone to Mark and the crew from the States. Quite often I thought that R2D2 had hacked into the phone call and was not at all happy with me for some reason. After some conversation we ended up agreeing that email was far more reliable.

Ciarán got lumbered with the finance officer and is busy figuring out how to get the stipend transferred to us.

I note one of you has his hand and wants to ask a question. Go ahead. "What is our hackerspace's philosophy?" you ask. Well I'm glad you asked that question as I was struggling to come up with an un-contrived way to work this into a blog post. You really saved my bacon. Well our hackspace can been summed up with three sayings.

0) Don't be on fire.

This embodies our essential and fundamental philosophical belief that each individual human should strive not to combust in an oxygen rich atmosphere. The rules of thermodynamics are against us, but with care we have so far managed to maintain this rule. We have enshrined this philosophy as our hackspaces rule 0, showing the reverence that we hold this axiom.

1) Well volunteered.

We believe in self-empowerment and also spreading out power among our members. So whenever someone suggests a project or problem that needs fixing they become responsible for implementing it.

2) Let me show you this neat thing.

We enjoy sharing our knowledge and projects with other people, this extends to young hackdays where we teach young kids about technology and how to make things.

That interlude out of the way, let us meet the team:

Solexious: An advanced robot sent from the future for turning pizza, chips and Cola into circuit boards and lulz.

Mark: Well known Tom Cruise impersonator ms7821 takes breaks from his busy impersonation schedule to hack assembler, C, python and troll people on IRC

Ciarán: One day this chemist wandered into the hack space, a lair of programmers and electronics geeks. So far he has managed not to arouse the suspicion of the natives.

Eb4890: This overly dreamy coder/CNCer tried to organise an application for a global hackspace challenge. Too late did he realise his mistake. In revenge for his heinous crime of organising he was crowned leader of the challenge. An empty title, but now he has to relearn little used cat herding and electronics skills.

Monkeyjam: The youngest member of the group, he will make sure that the old guys can communicate with young people and not go into endless monologues about how back in the day we only had 50 MB storage and 4MB of ram. And no that was not in our phones, it was in our computers.

Others: Please to be placing yourself

Pictures: http://wiki.hackspace.org.uk/wiki/File:2011-03-22_21-16-44_367.jpg

http://wiki.hackspace.org.uk/wiki/File:2011-03-22_21-17-22_712.jpg

http://wiki.hackspace.org.uk/wiki/File:2011-03-24_18-47-07_190.jpg