Project talk:Classroom HackSpaceChallenge

Relevant experience in education etc

in terms of biggin-up the hackspace, it would probably be sensible for us to add we have members who know about education / child development / classroom environment /etc.

Is any of our members a teacher?

I have some relevant experience myself: I've worked in educational software, design and build of games to match against specific educational targets in the uk national curriculum. I've also been a volunteer youth leader (Scouts) for the past 6 years - I know Spike is an ex-Scout leader too. Anyway, if people feel this is relevant then feel free to write it into the draft.

AndyE --92.40.139.130 15:31, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Ideas

• Do you mean lego? I think something between Lego mindstorms and PICAXE/Arduino, as I know at my school (and the Young hackspace kids) love to get the mindstorms out - but the PICAXE programming overwhelms them slightly (maybe due to bad teaching?), so school doesn't use them a lot. Maybe making it inter-operable with lego pieces? I know there is a guy at the hackspace trying to reverse engineer them, and the modular-ness is great. (MonkeyJam)

• I meant logo, kids today :P. Modularness would be cool. If we had a working makerbot we could make bricks that are lego compatible(maybe not the hackspaces?). Or could we do something with the laser cutter, hmm.

• The makerbot would seem the obvious way - but we wouldn't need to make many pieces as schools may already have lego - I was just thinking making a different sort of 'brain', where they can learn more about EE, (making it better than NXC) as well as a kid friendly language. So there is more guidance than with arduino, but its more open than Lego, and is hackable if you know what you are doing.

Programmable Bricks

What about ... bricks which allow you to create programs? So, for example, a brick which does an "if" statement, with an input and two outputs (for true and false), an input for the condition (so, a sensor reading brick perhaps). Something like LabVIEW except physical objects instead of theoretical ones. You could have the contacts be magnetically attached. You could have power coming from a "start" brick, perhaps with a LiPo battery? And give it a USB interface for both charging and manipulating it via a computer if you have one available.

You'd design the interconnects such that it's impossible to plug them in wrong (for obvious reasons).

This would give people the chance to use mechanical design techniques (maybe build prototypes with makerbot/laser cutter), electronics (custom PCBs), as well as some fairly hardcore programming which would puzzle people for hours.

Very Similar idea: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRTsk7SAKMs

Except we'd want something a bit more rugged and portable

Open Spectrometer

A small box that could be cut from laser cutter parts (probably MDF), and assembled with simple components (screws bolts etc). Along with some slighly more complicated motors and electronics. Moving mechanical components could either be from laser cutter or from Makerbot (or RepRap).

It would semi-need to be plugged into a laptop for obtaining the raw data, although there could be alternative modes that feedback information to a simple multi-line display without a laptop. Ie absorbance, good for concentration vs absorbance experiments.

• This should be easy to fit into the confines of the competition, although I personally hadn't thought of a portable power supply it should be simple enough to incorporate. I have ideas that I will try and outline soon to help development. Ciarán
• Is that a machine to find out what elements are in a sample? Like a mass or IR spectrometer? You can make those? Daniel
  • Well it is usually used for chemical identification, though some decent analysis I'm sure you could do elemental analysis. This would be a visible light spectrometer, a mass spectrometer is much much more difficult and expensive to make (£100,000's). I'd like to attempt an IR spectrometer in the future but not at the moment.Ciarán
  • But yes you can make visible spectromerers, relatively simply. They can also be useful rather than a toy, I hope! Ciarán

I'm not sure how components will be obtainable around the world, but the designs would mean that alternatives could be made from other materials. There is no need for it to be MDF.