A J BOOKER - EDUCATIONAL CONSULTANT

How much power, how much time, how much expertise

2012-01-16T11:59:00.002Z

Half a century ago the Science Fiction Author Isaac Asimov wrote of Multivac. It was a huge single computer that everyone connected to with a terminal. A terminal is a device that merely displays the information sent to it by a smart computer somewhere else and sends back key presses. Every time you search Google you effectively use your £500 iPhone as a 'dumb terminal'. Huge computers with terminals pretty much ruled computing up till the first IBM compatible PC and the Mac's and Asimov imagined a world where a single huge computer ran everything, bit like Google really! Since then there has been two main strands of computing developing side by side. Schools and office type businesses do almost no processing on their servers, the servers store but the number crunching of the data happens on the individual computer. Huge institutions and universities that have to manipulate ,karge amount of data use racks of servers and increasingly 'virtual computers'.

I have written before about the danger of having your data too far away, but lets look at the opposite approach, put EVERYTHING on the cloud, including the actual computers that are doing the thinking, and save a ton of money and hassle. This autumn Windows 8.0 will be released and the world will be locked into a cycle of upgrading. The computer that was good enough today will seem slow and the new whizzy bits and pieces will only work well if you upgrade... or so it will seem. But what if the computer was not in your school or home, but instead only the 'dumb terminal', the keyboard and mouse that interacted with a computer tens hundreds or even thousands of miles away? In fact, don't bother with a single computer you operate remotely, instead use virtualisation where many 'computers' will run on a single high powered specialist box. Each user sees their own computer as though it was under their desk, but in reality it isn't actually 'there'.

Six months ago a seemingly small company called Onlive launched a gaming service, It costs about £300 to buy a playstation or xbox with 5 of the latest games and these games very quickly lose value. Onlive offered a virtual games console with games for a low monthly fee. You saw almost the same thing you would see on your tv if the actual games console was under it, but your tv or iPad or laptop or desktop computer acted as a dumb terminal, almost all its power was ignored and it instead became a way of viewing and interacting with streaming content live, the games. I was one of many who thought it was unlikely to work well given average internet speeds but surprisingly it does. You will never match the timing precision needed to play the very best people on-line as you are dependent on your speed of internet connection, no connection no input and kabloomey to your game score, but if you have the speed, you can play games originally developed for these incredibly powerful consoles on a humble laptop that couldn't display a few 3D boxes normally.

So whats this got to do with Multivac? Well, last Thursday Onlive announced a desktop version, a virtual windows 7 computer running office. Available only in America at the moment, it allows you to use a basic speed but effective computer running Word and Excel etc but from your own computer. Onlive have already released an iPad app so users in America (There seems little chance of getting it working here in the UK at present without jailbreaking your iPad) can use a full windows 7 desktop , edit real word documents, save load etc etc from their touchscreens. The amount of data that needs to be sent over the internet for such applications is tiny compared to fast moving and high resolution games but even better, upgrades patches and security features can be applied en masse at the server side. OnLive are talking about offering higher level packages for more power intensive programs. The idea of using the 3D package Maya from an iPad is amazing, but I think the biggest difference will be with the 90% of computing that most schools and offices do already. The professional version of onLive offers full office suite, a full web browser and more running on a windows 7 virtual computer that you can access on any reasonable computer at school, and your students can access on their PS3's, iPads, internet tellys and presumably eventually xBox phones and Wii consoles at home, for $10 a user a month. Even without quantity discounts, that means no more hiring office licenses, paying for people to install it and debug your systems, training up staff and constantly constantly upgrading to the latest system and patches just so your computers don't fall behind. Of course, no internet means no functionality but for many schools they are already in that position when they're management systems, pay rolls, almost everything, communicates through the Internet...

And MultiVac? It featured in many stories by Asimov, as a way of showing that such a system would know everything about you, could predict crimes based on patterns of behaviour, offer help in times of need, and that loss of privacy was the first casualty of increasingly relying on computers. He was quite far sighted really!

Future Present?

2012-01-02T17:24:00.002Z

This blog is about a future present, or even a future project! I have attended a few demonstrations of solid modelling machines. Each was rather wonderful except for the cost of materials which still, for the professional machines from Hewlett Packard and Z Corp, cost about £180 kg. True a kg will go a long way if you make something tiny, but then there's the dreaded support material. If you make a dome as a frail shape of thin spars, you end up with a huge amount of support material underneath. This support material is usually the same or a significant proportion of the actual building material and is often not recyclable so a fairly simple model costs big time if it needs a lot of support as its built to keep structural integrity.

Of course you can design with minimal support material and use clever tricks to reduce the need for it but you are going to have to be a 3D graphics expert and an expert in 3D printing first if you wish to use those skills.

This means that companies who have hot designers can make the most efficient use of such 3D printing techniques. One such is http://www.myrobotnation.com/ which has an online HTML5 web tool which lets you build a simple robot and colour it in 3D. Then if you pay a fee, they will print it in full colour and send it to you. For small models this is fairly cheap, about £12 for a 50mm high one, but for 150mm high, because of the much higher manufacturing costs and volume of printing required, the price shoots up to £120! I strongly suspect the parts you choose from are hollow, to keep the volume and therefore amount of material used to a minimum. Careful design keeps the cost low and online design software means anyone can make a jazzy robot and those who wish to do so can print it.

You can save designs but only for 2 weeks, but this might be enough time to organise a robot competition and have the winners manufactured and posted from the companies manufacturing base in America... Perhaps some English Literature Sci Fi projects could get a lot more interesting, 3d, and real!

For those who know about the cheap abs meltign machines such as the Thing o Matic, they are great for those who have unlimited time or technicians. Perhaps another two generations of development (18 months time!) and well see truly excellent high resolution results at low cost on a school bench. Till then it s going to have to be 3D printing bureaus for making those wonderful full colour robots!

Ammonite Projects

2011-12-20T13:25:00.003Z

Way back in the 1980's when it was fashionable for teachers to have big fuzzy hair do's rather than because they own overly powerful hair driers and under powered fashion senses, a new type of school project became available to mainstream schools. Suddenly 'Design' was the new buzzword and many schools, then educational organisations and (very) finally exam boards embraced this new ethic. The projects were revolutionary for the time! A puzzle frame, A box to hold things that were measured FIRST and a PROJECT FOLDER that considered the users needs rather than your dads. It greatly changed DT and with the IT revolution in schools, we got CAD and then EXPLORATION.

I write these words in capitals because they took over the imagination of teachers in their day. In the 1990's we then got innovation and design started to become less about the colour and style and more about the function. Bauhaus started to seem like a cool way of doing things. It was also the age of the quick project. Newspaper bridges, Eggs supported with sphaghetti high in the air, string transport systems. No longer was it neccesary to produce a total product, you could expore the world and find out stuff without needing to varnish it afterwards!

Unfortunately, many schools are stuck in this mode, even some educational organisations that should know better. I recently attended an event for teachers and academics to meet together which started with the 'build a bridge out of newspaper and sellotape' competition. I actually came second from bottom! This was because no'one measured how far apart the tables were we built from, no'one bothered that many were stuck firmly to the tables and that deflection was fine resulting in bridges that only 4x4's could have crawled uphill on. I was not impressed because despite a decade of trying to get teachers and organisations to think strategically and plan effective activities with rules and mark schemes, the person running this one hadn't even thought it through and there was little that made the task educationally applicable. All we really learned was that cheating won as by sticking ever larger amounts of rolled up paper together, eventually one could support an elephant, but not an educational learning experience.

Now budgets are down, teachers workloads are up and the goverment has delayed the implementation of educational reform http://bbc.in/s77zgL that will rot some departmest as schools decide to wait and see which subjects have traction in the new curriculum model. Why invest in training in a department where half the staff may leave in the next 5 years due to subject reduction. I think many schools are in for even more newspaper bridges run without thought, eggs supported without planning or considered outcome, more ideas left behind because investing is diffciult when you dont know what you are investing in..

These dusty bridges and ascending eggs are ammonite projects. Fossilised and slowly becoming tokens of a wider culture rather than a gateway to new learning opportunities. Most museums sell ammonites attached to keyrings, something to remind you as you get on with the real work. Will these ill prepared and ill defined dinosaurs condemn you and your department to a dusty drawer? Change them! Do something new! Lest the chill wind of change dessicates your very creative bones...

2011-12-12T17:36:00.003Z

Finally I have got the wrinkles out of a set of 8 new free projects for DT and STEM teachers.

www.nelc.net (Nottingham e-Learning Centre) have commissioned me over the past 24 months to write a set of 8 different projects. These are totally new to education and all have Teachers notes, presentations, worksheets and loads of specialist files. many also have e-Learning films, Sketchup models and one has Circuit Wizard files

They are all on a dedicated website I have written at www.notadesktidy.org (Remember the www bit at the front, its essential)

There are Vacuum Bazookas, Chicken Shaped Catapults and Quantum Tunelling Compound Operated Bracelets to name just a few of the 8 separate projects for free download there

Please tell everybody!

Boiling it down STEM and education

2011-12-06T11:41:00.005Z

Here in the UK there has been an unprecedented shrinkage of the education ' market' for goods and services in the last 18 months. Large numbers of companies have folded or drastically reduced. Many training establishments have laid off staff to the point where some buildings are mostly empty for most of the time because there are few calls for their services now. For those who choose to look, there is evidence of a generation of consultants, advisors and content developers retiring. This is unsurprising given many have already been teachers, HOF and then staff at an educationally linked company for many decades. This is starting to affect the abilities of teachers to take on new projects. Often stripped of funds to attend outside training courses, and with the now unsubsidised training agencies asking for full fees, the market for their services is slowing and likely to stagnate further from April 2012.

Does this mean I am packing it all in? Not at all! I saw the changes in the

market some time ago and have been working towards a different consultancy model, one in tune with the growing STEM agenda in schools.

Last week I launched www.stemday.co.uk , a site packed full of new educational projects I have developed that you can buy in class sets of 25.

All the support files, presentations, worksheets etc, teachers notes and learning films are free to buyers.

At a time when teachers cannot get out of the classroom for training, StemDay projects come to you. You can hire my modestly priced and extensively recommended services by the day (£350 + VAT + travel), or you can buy all that concentrated educational goodness in a highly professional package by purchasing kits and downloading the extensive FREE delivery and training resources. For example, a set of 25 GraviCars, powered by a bottle of water, costs just £135 + VAT, including delivery to anywhere on mainland UK.

StemDay project resources make a great INSET activity, guiding you stage by stage through building, tuning and testing the practical activity. Obviously they are also a fantastic focus for faculties working together to deliver STEM

So whether you're new to STEM, looking to run further STEM projects or want to try something new that will transform your teaching, try my kits!

And now for something completely different

2011-09-13T10:07:00.008+01:00

I have been working at various technologies over the summer holiday:

For the casually interested, I've been experimenting with Garageband on the iPad for Educational use. I know that some teachers look down on the iPad version of Garageband because of its limited (At the moment read non-existent) ability to input and output samples. I suspect that the upcoming iCloud (Oct in UK) will go some way to sorting that out. I know that on the iPad it is a sublime, simple and relatively easy to understand DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). I suppose the more you use it the more you notice whats missing, but for the price of an iPad, and the base version will work fine (£399) you get a complete recording studio complicated enough for most casual users/ bands, plus a state of the art fondleslab as touch screen tablets are becoming geekily known as. A standard guitar interface such as the Griffin brand one works extremely well and there are a couple of companies producing serious studio quality microphone interfaces with mics for under £100 which will surpass the quality of any cheap Zoom or Tascam hand help recorder mic.

For the keen technologist, I have finished translating a 3D shark model (3DS) into a 1 long metre set of 63 vertical slices to create a hanging model for a client that requested it. Not easy, not fast but if they can assemble it.. should be a great advert for their faculty and inspiration for the next cohort learning CadCam. It was one of those projects that was far easier to state the problem than produce the solution!

For the seriously Geeky, I am working on a PCB for a new educational Electronics Project using an 8 pin PICGenie to drive an RGB LED as a wall washer through sequential programming of Pulse Width Modulation commands using variables to cycle through a (relatively random) set of colours at the push of the switch and experimenting with reflective tube mixers (Rolls of aluminium foil) to dissipate the three focussed beams to produce a steady hue. It uses a cars convex stick on side mirror to direct the light but at the moment I am still fiddling with protoypes and 'generic verses Piranha' brand LED's. What fun...

Here is a video of the prototype wall washer. There is also a PCB layout but as I am still making changes to the prototype, that is on hold. The main thing to notice here is the ease of use. A few resistors and a 3.5mm stereo socket make the programming interface, and a few led's make the output. The special programming leads are £12 but the basic Genie programming software which is a very slick and incredibly well supported design, is FREE. If you want access to advanced features and to design your PCB and see the effect on the PIC live, you need the full fat version of Circuit Wizard (NOT the one sold in Maplins, its missing PIC bits) , but for a total outlay of around £70 you could buy three cables and enough protoblocks and parts to keep a small electronics class happy all year!

Ripe Technology

2011-07-25T16:09:00.003+01:00

11 years ago I saw a demo by a senior lecturer at a UK university of Augmented Reality. Someone moved in front of a camera and the image was overlayed with a simple face mask. Amazing though it was, it took a whole university department to create and a fair few of them to keep it working.

Last week I ran an augmented reality 1950's inspired Retro toaster designing event. For 12 students in Leicestershire I delivered the event through Google Sketchup (STILL my 3d design program of choice) and through studying aspects of 1950's product design. Students used this knowledge to design their own toaster around a 3d model of a mechanism I had previously created for them.

At the end of the day all the students were able to view their model by holding up a printed sheet to a webcam, turning the paper to make the model appear to be turning in their hands. Even more remarkably, it has been possible to create a stand alone file (a few clicks within Sketchup) that students emailed to their friends which when run, just needs the printed out 'marker' design held up to a camera for their friends to view it as well.

The 11 years this has taken between a technology demonstration and now is a good example of how the best Technology is not necessarily the cutting edge stuff, but that which has matured. I am confident now that I can teach staff to run their own Augmented reality events, integrate it into the curriculum and ensure that EVERYONE in a class of 32 students can do their own. At the point where everyone can participate, then the technology is truly, IMHO, ready for schools. ANYONE can show a demo, but it takes time and careful selection of equipment, software and project to ensure that EVERYONE actually does something educationally worthwhile with it.

Last week I did the mask thing. I knocked up a quick GoatBird mask in Sketchup then invited students to stick the 'marker' to their heads. A rather awkward student normally instantly changed and danced in front of the camera, wearing this non-existent but very real mask.

Today I took delivery of a PICO Projector, a tiny battery operated LED projector which I am experimenting with for taking augmented reality on to the next level. Again the PICO projectors have been available for a few years, but now I believe the technology is now mature, and like all things mature, ripe for use

Thousands of Pounds

2011-06-09T09:15:00.003+01:00

Sometimes a cheap idea works just as well as an expensive one. This idea needs 20 sheets of A4 paper, a ping pong ball and some drawing pins.

These students had a limited time to build something that would slow the ball down as it moved from the top of the 'wall' to the bottom. This design took 6 seconds for a ping pong ball to travel through it. I reckon times in excess of 30 seconds should be achievable with just paper tubes fixed at shallow angles.

The tubes are pieces of paper rolled and pins used to hold the overlapping edges together and pin these through to the pinboard backing

I have suggested to a primary school they build a giant version covering a whole wall, with ramps and tubes, hoppers and swivelling parts, all from thin card and paper with maybe a few swivelling self adhesive bits

Augment Reality Toasters and Budget Catapults

2011-06-02T10:58:00.005+01:00

My next project is going to be a 1950's inspired Toaster design 3D Graphics 1 day student event incorporating augmented reality for displaying the final designs.

It is going to be mega... and I will post details of it as it develops.

In the meantime, here is a 4 metre release height catapult you can build for £30 that throws a can of coke 60 metres easily. I designed and built these for a client to run a Science event on forces. Here is the catapult in use throwing a cricket ball (All the coke exploded after one throw!) about 45 metres easily. Unfortunately the moving speck which was the cricket ball doesn't show up well in the uploaded version but it reached half way up the bank at the end of the field they are on.

180mph in a 30 zone

2011-06-02T10:20:00.003+01:00

I am typing this on my new laptop. A Dell XPS 15. In fact you will have to move fast if you want one because this model will be unavailable in about a month as this is the OLD model. The SLOW model with the OUTDATED graphics and LOW amounts of memory that I have just spent good money on.

In real life use though, it is absolutely fine. I typically run 7 graphically intensive programs simultaneously using the laptop to power 2 x full HD monitors and it rarely slows down. I COULD have bought something three times as fast for twice the money (This XPS cost me £440 shipped and inc VAT, after 11 hectoring calls from Dells call centres over 48 hours to negotiate the price down bit by bit.... they are advertising the identical same computer right now for £580 online!)

But this is not a brag, just pointing out that 10 years ago my computer cost £1650, 6 years ago my first laptop cost me £1540, 2.5 years ago the old laptop cost £700. My next laptop after this one... may not be a traditional laptop at all, and that's because No-One I personally know, needs the power of the modern laptops typically selling now for £800+. Its like owning a Ferrari in a country with a blanket 30mph speed limit.

In the next month, Google will launch, partnered with various laptop manufacturers, Chrome OS Laptops. This will be a game changer for education. The OS stands for operating system. These are not Mac or windows computers, they are their own separate, standalone computing platform.

Chrome OS laptops don't store any user data on them, and typically they have installed only the very basic office software. Everything is stored, and increasingly computed, on the Internet. If you want to edit photos, you will use an online editing program to do this. Printing will be via wifi of any document you have. Though this sounds fabulous, there are a couple of caveats... First you need to have a permanent reliable fast internet connection otherwise all you have is a doorstop. Secondly the range of programs and their power is limited so though 95% of tasks students and staff do in schools could be handled by Chrome OS laptops, you will still (As will I) need some traditional computers for CAD, Music, Video Editing etc.

So why should schools consider Chrome OS laptops in the future (Not now, give them a year to iron the bugs out and bring out some killer applications, like the iPad took to get really useful)? Because of cost savings. No heavy infrastructures, no huge servers, no hyper expensive network fixers. Probably no viruses. Also any student and teacher can use any Chrome laptop and it configures, when they log in, to their security level and chosen settings. Finally, they are going to be very cheap... Probably £200 in 2 years time... Because they are just a screen, an internet connection and a very big and rapidly strengthening idea.

The traditional ICT system that supplies schools is going to fight this very hard. The basis of their business model is that you HAVE to get the latest software, update, hardware, system management utility otherwise all that nasty spyware will kill your school, but I have started to wonder whether all the mega computing power schools wield is actually there to keep these behomoth systems working. A new version of windows needs a new bigger browser so a new bigger network system so a bigger server, but look hard at what 95% of your students actually do.... Most of it is writing reports, making basic spreadsheets and producing presentations. I know Microsoft charge very little for Office to schools, but that is because you use very little of it apart from the basic tools that Office had 20 years ago (Go Look at Word 6.0 for Windows 3.1 if you don't believe me. It ran slow, but it had similar functionality for students needs to Office 2010)

And why do I think this will happen? Because of the iPad. It showed me that most things we USE a computer for now are basic, already internet based and don't need a massive infrastructure to work.

Chrome OS.... Keep an eye out for it!

Who owns your project?

2011-05-04T12:28:00.002+01:00

Cloud computing is the latest buzzword for using online programs and storage to carry out tasks. If you have ever uploaded a photo to a website, tweaked the look and size and saved it in your user account, then you have done cloud computing. Increasingly schools are using such online tools and storage, sometimes without realising thats what they are doing.

The vast majority of these tools are free, and when you have the chances to offload your storage and get access to some seriously cool computing tricks, it becomes very compelling to schools with increasingly tight budgets... But are you actually in charge?

There have been a number of music services online which shut down when they went bust or failed to make money for their owners. Annoyingly for people who bought music through them, some lost the lot and then found out in the terms and conditions that they had merely been renting the music and there was no legal imperative for the service to be available forever. Others have used online tools to edit photos, then found the website closed, bit of a problem when all their schemes of work use it. Even worse, students saved work would also disappear.

Even more interesting is where your data is stored. Increasingly companies use secure data centres, either huge air conditioned buildings with rack upon rack of servers, or natural caves tricked out like a James Bond set. They may even not be in this country, possibly not even on the same continent. Where the data is unlikely to be, in the event of a power / data cut at your school, is somewhere in your building!

Cloud computing and storage is an inevitability, but maybe we need to look beyond the headline claims by companies offering us this cool option and consider where and how our data is stored. Schools who would not allow a laptop home with sensitive student data on it seem fine with having that data 'anonymously' located somewhere they have no physical access

Remember - A USB stick in the hand is worth far more, during a crisis, than a thousand in a climate controlled data centre a thousand miles away!

And before you think that is the only thing to worry about, read this!

http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/75-year-old-woman-cuts-off-internet-to-georgia-and-armenia-2011047/

for 12 hours, 90% of users in an entire country had no internet access because a pensioner stole the cable. Keep your friends close, and your data closer still... or at least the copies!

Look through your window

2011-04-25T09:27:00.003+01:00

Recently I visited a school while it was closed. Many UK schools now share facilities such as sports halls and pitches with the public. This school was one of these. Every week thousands of people walk past the huge windows common to all schools and can see whats going on. A friend was with me and wondered why I was earnestly peering through the windows, the school was shut, , then when he came to look as well he exclaimed... It looks just like my old woodwork room!

I like to think that I can decipher the room a bit more professionally and from the three rooms I could see into, there was almost no ICT or evidence of it visible. Instead the rooms displayed the top three indicators that someone somewhere had given up inspiring students, and instead settled,(Probably not without a fight) for processing them instead.

If you have at least two of these in your room, is it time to change?

1: The immaculate project pages covering a whole wall by a student from at least 3 years ago which sets an impossibly high standard for all the others, and inevitably involved them spending many many times the allotted hours on their coursework, just to achieve that last 10% of marks. Why we parade these 'perfect' projects I do not know, they set an impossibly high bar for the average student and emphasise the prettiness of work over its function to inform. A decade ago an exam board told me that fancy borders gained no marks anymore, yet the person they sent round to assess some students work that year in a school I visited, waxed lyrically over a similar project by a student, condemning another years cohort to hours of wasteful decoration on an already tight timetable.

2: The poster which came with Blueprint or another technology magazine, usually showing a cutting edge or classic piece of design. Blutak'd to a wall, it is pointed to for inspiration but forms no coherent part of a display, has no further explanation and usually no student inspired work branching from it. Favourites are the Charles Eames Lounger or classic chairs, The London Underground Map and cutaways of the 'new' Mini. Hanging forlornly they're yellowing edges communicate much more than their intended message. Dyson posters, a product of extreme levels of design, prototyping and state of the art manufacture utterly unavailable in schools, are becoming a new category of these iconic wall hangings

3: A selection of badly made, poorly designed projects which needed a bit more effort and thought but have become part of the carousel of experience. Nowadays this is often a token electronics project, represented by two pieces of hardboard screwed at right angles to each other with a 'steady hand game' hot glued to it, behind a hand written background

Some will find this post depressing, thinking that I am unaware of the lot of teachers, the tests and timetables and issues involved in modern teaching seem to become more onerous every year, but think about why you went into teaching! Perhaps tidying those books, refreshing those posters, changing those projects a little could change your attitude and working environment as much as your students... and would that be a bad thing?

WebSite Update

2011-04-25T09:19:00.003+01:00

The www.ajbooker.co.uk website will be taken down in the next two weeks but the majority of application files will be placed in a directory online for people to download the files as they see fit.

This means all the 2D Designer DTD files, JPG photos, .PCB Circuit Wizard files etc will be still be available but you will have to sort through them carefully

I think it is timely to remind people that most of the files getting the heaviest access, such as revision cards for electronics and info on cardboard displays, were for specific examination specifications and should be carefully checked before you let them loose on your students. Most of the files on the site are not specific to a particular exam, but I have been surprised in previous years at the hundreds of views per hour of files for a subject, such as Graphics, hours or days before the examination paper was set. More on this another time...

Going Going Gone

2011-02-28T14:21:00.002Z

This post is to inform all my readers that the present www.ajbooker.co.uk website will be changed around Easter 2011 and it is highly likely that the vast majority of free files in the RESOURCES section will then be permanently unavailable

The website started about 2004 when I was still a teacher. I wrote it, mostly between 11pm and 1 in the morning) when schools systems couldn't cope with too many staff files, as a repository of teaching files and an advice centre for my students. It actually started as an electronics website which is still buried deep inside the main site. Over the years it grew and grew and I think it now has about 500+ pages, created on a computer I owned at the time using Dreamweaver. At its peak it had about 2 million hits a year, probably far more as many of these were local caching by schools from around the world

Now the website is so complex to change and time consuming to do so that I have decided to ditch it and start with something more focussed on my present consultancy work, without the myriad extra sites and hundreds of photo pages and images. Please feel free to download as much as possible before then, and if anybody wishes to host the core educational files within their own website, with a suitable link back to my new site, then please email me to discuss what and how

In its place will be a list of hopefully all the projects I have done as a consultant, along with links to sites I have created for clients and my own download areas for a small set of exemplar files

Given the traffic to the site over the years, it is ironic that I never got more than a handful of thank you's from school staff per year, especially as it was clear just before exam time in the uk that hundreds of users per hour were accessing the relevant pages...

I have been on the Internet since we called it Cyberspace (About 1996) and it still seems to me that quality content is what people want, unfortunately just after they have tweeted their dinner menu and updated their facebook status

So please feel free to graze the shoals of data there, but soon I will dynamite the reef!

2011-02-09T15:37:00.006Z

Image Quality

Every so often there is a game changing bit of software for education. Usually it is the result of a market maturing, Education gets the benefit some years after the technology is used in industry and usually by then the wrinkles have been ironed out. We can see this benefit to education in the plethora of PIC electronic systems, all based on pretty much the same programming kernel and chip (whatever some may argue) and offering near identical levels of performance. Sketchup has been my choice for the last five years whenever a new idea pops in my head and I wish to model it, but the flaw has been the possibility of outputting truly stunning images to compete with the industry best. Certainly Pro Desktops b

uilt in renderer is far better than the different type of image presentation that Sketchup can produce and many teachers have told me they would miss that functionality.

Now there is a new way to output your images created in Sketchup, through a product called Shaderlight. This, like all truly useful education programs, needs as little as one button push from within your Sketchup window to produce a high quality rendered image. For those new to rendering, it basically plots the path of light which reaches every pixel in an image so if a surface is transparent and shiny, the light reaching it wi

ll be affected by what goes through it, illuminates it and reflects off it. There are other renderers out there which many schools use effectively for higher level work, but they take a fair bit of intuition and experimentation to use. To date, Shaderlight seems to be the only one which gets it right with basic functionality that works with that elusive 'one button'. For the more tecchie, yes it supports bump map type functions, comes with built in light models and you can tweak some parameters, but for you running a class of 30 students who need simple results, it can be a single button press! For those new to rendering, expect to twiddle your thumbs a lot. A simple model at 640 x 480 pixels takes about 30 seconds and

as you add more details and lighting and increase the image size, it can run to many minutes, but it runs in the background while you get on with something else.

The sample model here is shown as a Sketchup screen capture, and also as a 1024 x 768 rendered image in Shaderlight. I have spent a couple of minutes optimising the image in shaderlight menu, but not much. This is one of the first 3d models in Sketchup I ever produced. I never thought it would ever look this good without redrawing in a different and sriously more expensive and complicated package...

Gravicar develops

2011-01-26T14:01:00.003Z

Have now built a Gravicar, and several things have needed changing. The width didn't quite give enough room for the wheels to fix. If you were careful they worked well, but any slight difference in building and they fell off! So now the whole thing is 10mm narrower as well as having extra marks on the cardboard sheets of joiners to show which way is up when assembling the three main frames.
The 10Th of February is a big day because I am running a whole day event for 150 students in 6 classrooms, simultaneously building them as part of a STEM day I am running at a clients. This means getting all parts ordered and in stock, card pieces laser cut, info and building sheets copied and staff briefed. As with all my projects, I am going to base the building around a PowerPoint using Sketchup graphics and photos to show the stages. Backed up with a Students building sheet to build 'ON' and a diary sheet to record 'ABOUT' the day, that should be enough to keep them all going.
The one featured here rolls about 5 metres using the 500ml bottle of water. Replacing the wide wheels with CD's would give a very low rolling resistance and with string that unwound completely from the axle, should travel about 30 metres on a good flat floor indoors.
I am going to use very slight ramps to start it off as some built will be a bit 'sticky' with too much friction. Probably a sheet of polypropylene about 50mm high
This is not a new project, but I hope I have streamlined it enough that all the students can build it without too many problems, and that the non-specialist staff can assist them

2011-01-09T19:40:00.004Z

Mass manufacture:
A present client of mine wants to run a STEM event (Science Technology Engineering and Maths based) event for up to 140 students at the same time for a whole day. I have done a number of these events, developing ideas and training staff and often leading the day. The clients has a technician to cut parts and order specialist materials but not for this particular event. Originally this gravity powered car was to be made from sheet material, or using special huge cardboard pieces I had previously developed. To fit in with the time availabel to make the parts and source the other pieces, I designed this version below.
This version uses bought in 600mm wooden spars. These are joined first into three basic frames using an A4 sheet of laser cut cardboard pieces which also join the three frames into the final shape. Each laser cut piece is pre drilled with holes for the drawing pins which hold the pieces together while they glue and provide additional support while it is used. All other pieces are off the shelf components available from at least 3 major educational suppliers to minimise supply difficulties. With this design, and a bottle of water each, the students will all have a great learning experience competing in various activities

Chicken Catapullet

2011-01-09T19:29:00.003Z

This is a project for my client, Nottingham e-Learning Centres, devised as a set of files and exemplars to show just how creative you can be with a simple idea.
A laser cutter sales company was selling a simple ping pong ball catapult project and I was intrigued by this as not only was it cut out of 3mm acrylic, it also worked only moderately. With the support of www.nelc.net, I designed a new catapult from scratch as a set of simple elements that could be personalised and adapted. From this came the CataPullet, a chicken shaped catapult.
The design was developed in CAD (2D Design) then parts checked for size in Sketchup, then a first cardboard prototype cut on the SELC laser. Then this version in green acrylic. I was delighted that the worm shaped ratchet/trigger worked first time as it was the most difficult part of the design.
There are now 6 projects for FREE download at http://www.wix.com/nottinghamelc/notadesktidy (Flash only I am afraid) where teachers notes, exemplar files and video of me demonstrating the projects can be viewed.

I am always available to develop new projects for clients. This one was to drive visitors to their pages, something special that can also work in the classroom day to day!
Let me know if you want something for your organisation or company

NEW EVIL DETENTIONS IPHONE APP!

2010-11-01T08:21:00.012Z

Such a long delay between last post but things have been getting very busy here with new stuff for teachers... You can now download the IPHONE EVIL DETENTIONS APP... This has taken me and my programming partner, Screw tape Ltd, about 4 months to write and is available NOW in the App store.

There is a FREE version with 20 cards, a few of which have in-depth instructions and Audio notes, and the FULL version for 59p ($1) which has 30 cards with more added every three months, and all the cards have audio and helpful instructions AND a fab random card picker like a 3D carousel, AND you can choose card by different categories and ratings so if you are looking for a task thats easy to set up, you can choose one with a low equipment rating

Just search for Evil Detentions in the ITUNES store, also works with the newer Ipod Touches and supports high res graphics for Retina displays

Were now investigating revision cards so if you have any interest in these, let me know!

Hands on Parenting

2010-06-21T08:18:00.004+01:00

I have run lots of parent / child events. usually after school, they encourage parents to work alongside and in a team with their children and often rebuild relationships that had drifted apart. So much of young peoples lives are through mediums, toys, games, clothes, which overtly or subtly communicate the message that parents are uncool or 'not in the loop' and therefore having little worth hearing. Of course this 'buy me rather than trust those nearest you' culture is eventually outgrown by many and psychologists will tell us it is a natural part of human development, but in the extremely heavily promoted world of 'buy me' culture, parents can feel like an outsider in their own home, constantly buying new things to reforge the link with their children but finding these things separate them even more from them. Step forward Nintendo DS, Electronic Ritalin that shuts your children up for hours.. (Hate them, haven't bought them for my kids!)

Parent / Child events and courses reverse this. Most children crave their parents attention and look up to them, even during those teenage years when they appear to be all sarcasm and rejection... Get them together doing somethign that is new to them both and they start forging links again... In this time of budget cuts, real quality Parent / Child courses are getting rare, but if we lose that link between parents and children learning together and respecting / dicscovering their strengths, we lose the chance to benefit as educationalists from the support from home where students spend 60% of their weekday time

Totally unconnected, Found this wonderful product description on a website where this item, a hat, cost £120 and looked like a felt bag made by a donkey trader.. Read it and weep for those who see this stuff as so deeply important

(This Hat) 'explores the delicate balance of human forms, harmonising the ongoing dialogue between body and soul within his collection. Oversized, almost floating elements are meant to provide space between skin and garment, representing a new spiritual freedom. 'This Brand' eliminates the unnecessary, concentrating on the essentials of shape and form while a lack of buttons and trim heighten the wearer's appreciation of simplicity. Our relationship with nature is seen through colour. White symbolises purity, red is blood and energy and black is thoughtfulness -the beginning, the end and what is yet to be discovered. '

Hmmmmmmmmmmm

Simplicity or complexity - Depth Matters

2010-06-19T07:23:00.003+01:00

This is a project I am setting up for a client. Originally I was asked for something Eco and suggested a solar powered light. I investigated the lights and found out that those cheap £1 garden lights are not easy to make in schools, and certainly not cheaply. They are very highly mass produced and include components, such as the curiously named 'Joule Thief' that are not going to be easy to make with 12 year olds in a few hours! So I developed a simple light Jar using small cheap solar panels that charges up two AA batteries and turns on and off when you turn it upside down, but the total cost of all the bits still came to over £7 each! If I had wanted to buy a million kits they would probably have been £0.50- including the jar...
Also the teacher in charge didn't think her staff would have the skills to assemble the connector block based circuit and troubleshoot any problems.
So I went back to the sketchbook, simplified it again and still it looked too complicated for the time now available which had shrunk to around 2 hours!
So I started thinking about the project from the other end, not starting with the electronics.. The core skills were building something using hand skills, becoming used to manipulating simple electronic components and producing a circuit that would enhance a garden, and thus the Electric Lizard project was born. This one is made of 3.2mm aluminium wire, joined together with connector blocks and uses a 2 x AA switched battery box driving 2 x 3mm Rainbow LED's as eyes. Hung on a wall, the eyes illuminate the area around the head and slowly cycle through the colours of the rainbow. There is no need for any resistors or other components and a simple sleeve protects the led legs from short circuiting. I showed it to the teacher in charge and she was delighted, and now I have used some wonderful coloured wire from www.wires.co.uk to create a multicoloured version which will have 2 x AAA batteries, and the 2mm aluminium wire will be easy for little fingers to bend into shapes.
This original prototype in the photo has been passed around loads of students and they are very excited at the prospect of making them, which is a valuable asset in the classroom. It may not be the last word in electronics, but it is a positive learnng experience that is relatively cheap to make (£1.75) and will hopefully inspire the students to investigate electronics in more detail in the future

Cheap Resource or Overpriced Toy?

2010-05-20T07:17:00.004+01:00

I once boasted, somewhat immodestly, that given a class and a ream of A4 paper, scissors and glue, I could run an event for a whole day... To my extreme happiness, nobody has yet asked me to prove this, but I think the principal is still sound, it is the teacher that is the best resource, adapting the resources to their need. This has been proved in reverse many times and evidenced by the store cupboards of robots and techno gear in most schools, bought for some wonderful project, often based on the skills of a particular teacher, then when it or the teacher proves unable to fulfill their promise, the resources are quietly squirrelled away. Too valuable to dump, too complicated to use, and eventually too old fashioned to be applicable, such resources wonderful convoluted surfaces prove excellent at gathering dust, and for a few teachers, guilt. Many science departments suffer the same ignominy with beautiful glass cased mahogany framed instruments which are wheeled out once a year to demonstrate Boyles law and refresh the happy memories of the senior departmental members.
I got bit by this bug about 8 years ago. RealRobots was one of those magazines where you collect a piece an issue to make the robot. It was actually very good, and at a time when robots were very expensive, it promised, in 40 parts, a real programmable robot with advanced features. Unfortunately about issue 30 it became clear, despite my careful research before I convinced the Deputy head to buy a THREE subscriptions, that everything was not quite rosy and we would have to extend the subscription a further 20 issues per robot (Total 60) to get the controller... and pay extra to get features that were trumpeted as standard at the start. I pulled the plug and had to admit to the Deputy Head that I had been wrong, worse the school had lost a few hundred pounds. RealRobots, it turned out, hadn't got a complete product when the series started and there was a great outcry from buyers wanting to know where their promised 40 part controllable robot had gone.
So resources are a minefield. You can keep a class of toddlers happy with a few trays and a packet of cornflour for hours, you can also use the same resources with a Technology class to talk about materials science, thixotropic materials, bullet proof vests, Sorbothane and 'D3' energy absorbing phone cases. It is the skill of the teacher that matters, and their research before the teaching session.
So a real puzzle was the low sales of my PopGlider corrugated card plane through www.ajbox.co.uk . Developing the plane as a set of resources, including 3 presentations, teachers guide, worksheets and demonstration films, I expected it to be taken up by many and used, as intended, as the focus for practical learning around Materials Science, Flight, Air Density, Quality of Construction and many other areas. It seems though that it gets used as a filler, something to quickly build and try out with a class, and therefore, at £1 a plane, relatively expensive. I thought that all those free resources would encourage people to use the PopGlider to its full potential, without the resources it is a dull sheet of card, however brilliant as a plane... Of course, being made out of 100% recycled card and 100% recyclable, I could always eat them!

Bug Development

2010-05-19T20:11:00.004+01:00

Since getting a rather interesting clockwork bug a few years ago at a wonderful museum in Amsterdam, I have been looking at variations of it and developing ideas based around it.
most notably this has led to the Scuttlebug / Clockbug which looks like this and I have delivered as a project to over 500 students and their Teachers / TA's in the past three years.

But recently I have started experimenting with springy wire and other bits and I am now in the fourth idea and starting to fine tune the materials and make sure it is a bullet proof project.
This image was created in Sketchup... of course!

The first three versions were complete failures, hopefully this will be better...

Super Simple Activity = Complex learning opportunity

2010-03-19T10:59:00.004Z

Yesterday I ran a one day event on flight with a small group of Engineeri Diploma Students.
The day focussed on building a simple paper / card plane to learn the basics, then using this knowledge to design, build and fly a balsa wood and clingfilm glider
I already have my own design of corrugated cardboard plane sold through www.kitronik.co.uk / The PopGlider, but I wanted something which wouldn't virtually gurantee a good flight with basic assembly, so I designed the Chunky Monkey (named after the Ben and Jerry's ice cream). It is a single sheet glider which can be photocopied onto standard 160gsm card, then assembled with a spot of glue and some sellotape, and weighted with a bit of plasticine. Carefully built it flies pretty well, not as well as PopGlider, but certainly good enough to demonstrate whether it was well built. The event yesterday emphasised the importance of Balance, Symmetry, Alignment and Quality of construction. Get it right and flights of 20 + metres are possible indoors.
So my rough and ready plane proved a better way to maximise the students experience precisely because something could go wrong if instructions were not followed, skills not learned, quality not maintained... A metaphor for life really!

Male Textiles

2010-02-22T11:57:00.004Z

This idea is a simple magnetic closure textile project aimed at Male and Female students at KS3 (11-14 years). Spare headphone cable is wound round it and then it is attached to clothing to keep headphones close. I call the project SideWinder

I developed it from a project called 'lightband' for which there are free resources for on youtube and also at www.nelc.net under their 'not a desk tidy' directory of resources

Am supporting teachers trying this over the next couple of weeks with classes. It uses felt for the main material, two layers with a neodymium 10mm magnet and washer fixed between the layers. Simple, effective and capable of infinite variations by students and staff...

Quick Update - And getting what you need...

2010-02-22T11:43:00.002Z

Long time since last post...
Since then have redeveloped catapult into an adjustable mini version, tried to find a porgrammer for geogebra, Produced a new Textile project aimed at including boys for KS3, and lots more that I will post about in the next few weeks.

But First.... Kettles.
Just bought ANOTHER kettle. Same as the last 5, a leak between joints, usually between plastic and metal elements, allows water and steam to escape, forming hard water limescale deposits which open up cracks even more until eventually it is too dangerous to be used! Back in the late 1980's, I bought a designer kettle and the shop owner told me they would never last as long as traditional ones, he said ' everyone wants water level gauges and such stuff but all these things create seams which fail much qucker than old one piece kettles'. Well he was right, while our choice of kettles has rocketed, The UK Argos website now lists over 120, reading the customer reviews even on their site reveals they all suffer from leaks, because the manufacturers have given us all the things we seem to want, water gauges, coloured lights, soft touch handles, concealed elements etc, but they still seem to break after a few years or less of use. This seems odd when I know people with old kettles lasting ten or more years, the answer seems to be that we buy on features, not longevity..in fact if we have to compromise the features to get a product that lasts longer, we don't want it. But Wait, the famously long lasting Dualit brand also sell a kettle for a not inconsiderable £80, but reading the customer reviews reveals that these also leak... In fact, ironically, the more your kettle costs, the more Argos will charge you (they call it breakdown insurance, I call it swindling) to replace it a few years later when it leaks, even though you presumably thought that by paying more you were gettting something more durable.
Just like in kettles, you can have projects with lots of bells and whistles, or a simple one with a good premise and quality outcomes. Keep it simple and keep it durable... Don't ornament just to make it look great, it may fail on you unexpectedly.

Flag Day

2009-12-14T14:22:00.003Z

I am working with Bulwell Academy at the moment to develop a Year 8 project (Age 12-13) combining construction and textile skills
My idea for a flag project came as a way of publicising the new Academy by getting the best 10 students work made full size as 3 Metre tall flags suitable for indoor and outdoor promotion, direct developments of their initial 3 "wire and paper" designs, then this scale concrete and fabric version shown here
The design uses two disposable pudding bowls to make the mould and mould support to cast the concrete base. An M4 bolt with washers is embedded in the concrete, forming a post to screw on the nylon tubing (internally reinforced with a bamboo skewer so it bends most at the top) and attach the sewn flag
The trickiest bit was working out how to attach the flag to the pole, it is a twist of soft wire holding a keyring 'ring' on the mast. Tabs on the sail tie the sail to the mast, and create the necessary tension to give the sail shape, and the final version looks pretty good, if only about 500mm high
Now the practical has been 'sorted' for the most part, the project is passed back to the Teachers to work out how and in what order they wish to run the project for the 200+ students they have

Often new ideas are adaptations of existing ones, but made possible because an assessment is made before starting of the number of students, materials, time and staff skills able to be brought to the project. A good project is one able to be made by a busy teacher with a large number of students per week, not a consultant tinkering in their kitchen!
I am hoping that this project runs before Easter and I can post a picture of the final 200 flags flapping in the breeze ...

Simply Balanced

2009-12-06T21:16:00.004Z

I am presently developing a micro line following robot PCB, Have just produced a new use for a 555 timer chip, am redesigning a project from my first years teaching some (censored) years ago, and have started wondering how small you can make a programmable vehicle that can be soldered by children with normal levels of concentration....
But this is my latest project.. And there are no wires, chips, smart materials or anything else in sight.. Its called the Wobbler, and is a counterbalancing toy that 'balances' on two wheels, takes minutes to make and only needs a low level of skill with scissors, a screwdriver and any old laminator to make for less than 50p... But with a little planning you can get loads of educational goodness from it..
Science can use it to investigate leverage, Technology to investigate nuts, bolts and different fastenings, maths to investigate weight and balance, or as a filler activity for a group, themed for Christmas or another holiday. It will be available from www.nelc.net for Free as a presentation, Assembly films, three worksheets and exemplar photos

I have started to call my project ideas 80% projects, this means that if the educator doesn't wish to do any self development or investigation to adapt the project to their students, there is 80% of the project in the packs I produce, but if you use it as a core, something to build your own ideas and themes around, it could be as little as 30% of a quick project... and it will be a much better project than one run with just my, (in my opinion, highly professional,) teaching materials...

Copying...or Designing, the role of influence

2009-10-29T21:32:00.004Z

So here is my design for a guitar stand. I knocked it up in Sketchup because it is one of the free projects for use with the now immininent 'Cadface' (see earlier posts) to demonstrate just what you can do with it. I had previously designed a guitar stand like a frame structure, similar to an A' frame easel. It took ages, so I went back to basics and thought, cheap materials and a laser cutter or jigsaw. I designed this one based on 12mm plywood (Yes I know it will kill some lasers filters to chew their way through 12mm Far Eastern WBP smoky glue bond cheapo ply..) where everything was contained within one shape. Realistically it would be better if the pegs holding the guitar were 22mm dowel, but this also works.
Now I am just Waiting for the first GCSE project to come along, using CadFace, that bears an awfully similar appearance to this... How far removed from this design will tell us how inspired rather than copied the student has been working, andwhether the teacher is aware of my version, how high a mark they will get!
As for me, I first saw this idea on the wall of my Furniture Design tutors office where he had created an arch top folding chair out of a single sheet of plywood, cut with a jigsaw, and with all pieces already in place.... Influence or Copying? (And his chair was much better than this stand!)

Talk To Me!

2009-09-09T13:06:00.003+01:00

I have just spent a bit of time fiddling with various tools that allow me to see the visitors to my various websites. It seems that about 8000 seperate (called 'unique users) people a month are visiting my new ajbox site whcih is fairly good given up till today there was little on it!
After today there should be a total of about 50 free resources (250mb worth!) , worksheets, presentations, teachers guides etc etc for the 6 products I am selling through Kitronik of Nottingham...
So here is a request, CONTACT ME! Let me know how you are doing with the products. send me a photo or short vid, how do you like the resources? Let me have an image of a coloured / assembled version that I can put up to inspire others!
It is a sad fact that often the only time website writers hear from somoeone is when they write something contentious, or if there is a complaint or query. I was staggered to see that my ajbox resources have been downloaded over 500 times in the few months they have been live, but there have been only ONE email about them! And that was to ask where the link to them had temporarily gone!
So if you want plenty more totally free, utterly brilliant and decidedly fab resources... get in touch!

WordWand

2009-08-30T18:34:00.006+01:00

WordWand will be available in the new Kitronik Catalogue arriving at some 2500 schools during the first half of September 2009
It consists of a PCB with components and a huge array of free downloadable resources from my www.ajbox.co.uk website
Wordwand can be programmed with up to 16 characters, depending on your programming skills, but works best with about 4 characters in a message. The free resources will include a basic and in-depth presentation, 2 page starter and full 10 page Teachers guide, 5 sample programs in Circuit Wizard format (You will need version 1.5 onwards to view) and also sample programs in the free 'Genie Design Studio' program that is a free flowsheet editor and programmer that is virtually identical to the flowsheet programming within Circuit Wizard
I hope that having a useful project that is customisable to each student, comes with lashings of free resources and is relatively cheap, PIC will start to be used in many more schools in the UK. At its best it is a wonderful project where creativity and problem solving combine to produce an effective learnng tool, at its worst, as shown to me by a friends son who did PIC at his school last term, it is a bent piece of plastic with 4 lights that flash for no reason whatsoever that the pupil cannot fathom a real use for!

Who owns what?

2009-08-11T11:54:00.003+01:00

Was surfing today, looking for useful apps and came across a new site...

Apparently a new way to search through the gazillions of free 3D models on the Net. So I did a search for a few obvious things and there were spaceships and chimpanzees and bridges etc.. A lot of the stuff is serious commercial models costing anythign up to £1000's because the work which goes into them.
Then like all good Bloggers everywhere, I typed in my name, and got THIS
This is a list of all the FREE models I placed on Google Sketchup Warehouse. Now that is fine, I put them online knowing they would be free to everyone to download from 'warehouse', but I did not expect them to appear on a third party site like this, freely searchable alongside paid content. Maybe I should, information we upload often includes 'ownership' clauses that essentially gives it away. this applies to the images in this blog as much as those 3d models.
So when you develop work with your students, and place it on a showcase online, be aware that it may pop up somewhere unexpected! But that's the net for you...

Prototypes look rough...

2009-07-22T12:55:00.004+01:00

A common topic of discussion with staff accompanying students to my events is the lack of persistence in many students when faced with a problem to overcome. This is noticeable in a generation who interact with a commercial world which intentionally makes their products, even the project ones, deliberately easy to keep young people attracted to them. A new game my Daughter has, Viva Pinata, constantly guides and hints as to the best path or action and you can't really get it wrong.
The 'Lego' mentality ( Where you build a Lego kit following detailed instructions but never remake it into anything else) of many children where everything needs to be easy to do has led to the gradual reduction and rejection of real crafts and activities from their lives, and a greater learning curve for children and adults when they are asked to build something and perfect it. In fact many people are so concerned not to lose face by doing something that might not work, even though this is a valid stage to getting something to work, that they need a great deal of persuading and encouragement to keep them going and belittle their own efforts.
This has implications for designing activities for students and is a fine balance between making a 'press out kit', what I disparagingly call 'Crayola Craft' where nothing is left to chance and individuality and experimentation gets the boot early in product development, and supplying something which will work if you persist for long enough...
Which neatly bring me to this picture below. This rather rough lash up is the proof of concept for a new KS3/4 electronics project where students assemble a kit then experiment to program it so when waved through the air, the LED lights blink rapidly in a programmed sequence and persistence of vision means you will see words written in the air. My client, and educational supplier, wants proof it will work before placing an order... so I have persisted for some 4 hours to build it and test it... Still not there yet, I need to change the LED's for much brighter ones as the image does not persist long enough to see it clearly, but many of today's children would just give up now, they tried, it didnt work as expected, and can I have my Crayola kit back please because I KNOW it will work first time and will not make me look bad in front of my friends....

BoomBox and new PIC kits

2009-06-12T11:42:00.003+01:00

Today I pressed the production button and Kitronik will be able to supply you with BoomBoxes for the end of June. (see details at www.ajbox.co.uk )

Your school / college may have recieved a flyer from Kitronik already which also features the new Circuit Wizard PIC system, Pic Genie.

I have been experimenting with this (free to all registered users) updated version of Circuit Wizard and can report it is an excellent product. There are already at least 3 competing educational systems out there for schools wishing to do PIC, but the sheer rock solid integration of PIC into Circuit Wizard, including full real time simulation, programming and side by side running the flow chart (windowed) and PCB to see what is actually going on, is unbeatable in my opinion, and gives far greater accesibility with amazing possibilities for teaching electronics at all levels.

In fact, I was so impressed, have developed a new PIC Genie project for schools which will be launched this September in the main Kitronik catalogue. It is an innovative new project, one of three PIC projects I am presently developing, applying PIC technology in innovative ways to create kits and projects students will actually want to own...
. In September you will be able to buy the first kit, use Circuit Wizard or the imminient free programmer for Genie to program it, and run simulations on screen of the circuit for teaching. You will also get my trademark very high quality teaching resources free so you won't feel that you have to wade through a 64 page manual (You know who I am talking about!) to find out how to use it effectively.

Many schools see PIC as a bit of a black art when in reality it can be easier than setting up a 555 timer, and if it hasn't felt that easy so far, then Circuit Wizard and the new kits from Kitronik should change all that for all schools.

Announcing CadFace Sketchup Plugin

2009-06-07T23:22:00.004+01:00

This is the big one Clyde Davies and I have been working on for almost 2 years...
CadFace is a plug in that works within Sketchup to give you super quick, super simple CADCAM files from the free or full versions of Sketchup

With CadFace you can design clocks, signs, pencil holders, puzzles etc.. there will be free design projects for schools on the CadFace site very very soon, and with one click of a menu within Sketchup, save a CAD file of that flat face which works in ANY CAD PROGRAM on the planet!

We have set up a UK distributor for individual and site licenses, and are open to offers from other territories... Contact us at ajbooker@yahoo.com
We expect to release a limited functionality free demo in 2 weeks time, and the full version will be available during October 2009, along with worksheets, teachers guides and other info
Send us some feedback and watch out for that free demo!

Announcing Sketchup Training Suite

2009-06-07T23:08:00.004+01:00

A set of 10 e-learning films and Sketchup models for learning Beginner to Intermediate level skills in Sketchup, available to buy NOW as a single and site license from www.ajbox.co.uk
Check out the film for full details!
(If you would like an email of the full quality 800x 600 pixel film, contact me at ajbooker@yahoo.com)

BoomBoxes are GO!

2009-06-01T12:17:00.003+01:00

By the end of June, www.kitronik.co.uk will be the first stockist in the UK of my new BoomBox concept. For now, full details are on my www.ajbox.co.uk website

Boombox is a corrugated card box net which folds up to have three built in compartments for a speaker, battery and PCB, a hole for a 3.5mm plug and a built in removable speaker grille.

extremely cheap to buy, can be painted, annotated, drawn on and generally customised as required. Use in a custom graphics project to make a product or as promotional items to sell at a school fair

BoomBox is designed to fit the most popular school MP3 amplifier kits, and looks fabulous for minimal effort

The front speaker grille is perforated so you can remove it and use the four corner holes to mount your own design of grille
For schools wishing to do something a bit more exciting and creative than a plastic box again for amplifiers, or maybe you want to shorten your existing amplifier project... Then BoomBox will be what you need. The cardboard box even makes it sound better than a loose speaker alone

QTC's magnetic attraction

2009-05-05T15:15:00.002+01:00

Have been prototyping ideas for a client using Quantum Tunelling Compound (QTC) and SuperMagnets. Sounds very high tech but effectively its using the 'pull' of these super powerful magnets to squeeze some QTC to make electricity flow through a circuit. This means the QTC is being used as a pressure switch.
Even better is that QTC is cheap, about 35p (UK) for enough to work in my light bracelet, with the magnets costing about 40p.
I have agreed with the client to develop projects where the total cost of components / materials is no more than about £1.40. This rules out most gearboxes, and anything complicated so I am left with basic materials to make unusual projects.

£1.40 a project works because if it is easy for students to make, and personalise then it is far more likely they will bring in money to buy it, while if it costs £4, usually a state school will recycle the materials if possible. So investing £50 ina class project, confident of getting most of it back if taught well is better than having stuff left over every time.

It may seem odd to spend hundreds of pounds paying someone to develop a project that cost less than two quid (£2 UK), but cheap projects don't mean cheap thinking, usually it means full price cogitation to make something that we can all afford to use in class, and therefore develop both the teachers and the students skills in one affordable stroke!

One step ahead?

2009-04-21T09:44:00.003+01:00

In last nights episode of the Simpsons, Marge told Bart she could make money by giving piano lessons, "but you don't know how to play piano!" said Bart....
"I only need to keep one lesson ahead of the pupil" replied Marge.
Often a common approach in education where experience and knowledge should power the best education, not a quick flick through the textbook moments before the bell!
As a consultant I can help you hone your skills, link to other areas and consider how to build on what you know... I have occasionally just gone in and run an event by myself. they work, and have the desired effect, and I am delighted to be paid for them. Preferably though consulting involves interaction with the students and teachers, both building up solid transferable skills... and gaining in confidence. Confidence does not rub off by standing next to a Consultant, it happens through working with them!

Sketchy Physics

2009-04-21T09:25:00.004+01:00

Have spent a few hours playing with a free Plug-in (add on feature) for Sketchup. It enables realistic simulations of movement to be created in Sketchup. It is not very sophisticated and would be laughed out of most 3D conferences but it is fascinating what you can do with it.
Here is a film showing balls falling through poles. The speed of the film is recorded directly off my computer, the more that you simulate at one time, the slower everything goes it seems, but I have not explored the program in depth yet.
The normal Sketchup trick of reducing the window size makes no difference here as it is the physical calculations of the items movement and interaction that slow things down, and that is the same, regardless of the window or image size.
Another interesting feature is the apparent lack of random elements. When you run the simulation, everything always ends up in the same place it seems.

Ideas develop when many people think about them

2009-03-18T12:41:00.004Z

Have just finished the Draft project files for the PigBang vacuum bazookas for the Nottingham e-Learning Centres. (Should be available by end easter Holiday UK) To test the idea out with a different set of young people than I have used so far, I took three bazookas and all the bits to a Scout group in my area. Lots learned about running the project which is incorporated into the final draft... But also some amazing innovation.
The basic thing fired by PigBang is a piece of foil wrapped round a marble to give a flared hollow cone shape that fits nicely in the pipes. You can also use a Ferro Rocher chcocolate but inexplicably these always go missing when I leave the box open..
At the Scout session I demonstrated the foil and marble version, but also gave them plastic straws and some other bits. One innovative young thinker bundled the straws together into a very light but stiff cylinder, held it together with a couple of rubber bands and sleeved it all in foil.. With a marble on the end it became a superb test load in the bazooka.
I spoke to someone yesterday who wanted to know if Pigbang would be a kit project that you could explicitly follow stage by stage. I am personally against that but I do provide such instructions if required. The young Scout showed that being too prescriptive narrows peoples chances to experiment where for sure, they will sometimes get it wrong, but they also get it right as well... and in ways their teachers, leaders and consultants could not have predicted!

Why no photos?

2009-03-03T00:11:00.002Z

There are few outcome photos on this blog because clients tend to keep them and they often have students in them for whom I do not have photo release forms. therefore you get a lot of Sketchup and flat graphics because they communicate the main ideas well without my competitors ripping the idea off after studying them with a magnifying glass!

But for fun, here is an image from a new set of films about higher level Sketchup skills. It includes a film on how to make, stage by stage, this lovely retro 'Space 1999' style calculator bangle..Groovy!

I have this idea...

2009-03-03T00:02:00.003Z

Usually I am fortunate to work with clients who understand my more zany ideas, confident from my previous successes that the new ones, yet untested, will work. Sometimes though I have to prove it first!

This catapult is an example of just such an idea. I have designed it to be built from a single sheet of plywood and standard parts from any builders or large DIY shop.

I reckon it will throw a load equal to half a brick about 150 metres or more. Right now the main parts are marked out in permanent pen on a sheet of ply leaning against my house, awaiting a chance to saw them out and assemble the thing for testing! My hope is that when I have proved that it is economical, easy to build, effective and safe (How can an 11 foot catapult be officially safe?) then clients will let me run it with a whole year group as a day building or week long learning project..

Some say if you build it they will come, with an 11 foot catapult, you build it and they run!

Trial and Error

2009-03-02T23:53:00.005Z

So here it is... An image from a pack for a client. Nottingham e-Learning centres have commissioned a Pilot pack of materials for their website to encourage greater traffic to a section. I have been putting this Pilot together for a few weeks on and off but it is based around a simple idea I saw elsewhere, a vacuum bazooka

As I have said before, it is not enough to see an idea in a book or article, you need to actually know how it works because as a teacher in a classroom you do not want to be fiddling with settings the first time through

That is where consultancy comes in. the Pilot pack will contain Photos, Films with titles, me doing a talking head about the project, 2 worksheets to get you started, a 5 page manual and proof that the thing works! When it is all uploaded you will have a kit to run the whole thing where you can combine my skills in experimentation and creativity with yours in class delivery of your own students, and we are all a winner.

The Internet is full of 'all you need to do is' text statements of supposedly wonderful projects, perhaps we should have an agreed listing of what class projects should contain so that there is a minimum standard, then we can leave behind all those awful online 'lesson plans' which for many subjects take ages to source the materials, trial the lesson and work out the bugs!

Juggling, The most important lesson!

2009-02-06T07:51:00.004Z

Can you Juggle?
GCSE Students know, theoretically, that there is an end date coming and have some mental list of what they need to do to finish their work, but when the time comes it is those who are prepared who succeed. Those already with skills in ICT or hand working are able to produce quality work, and this is the important bit, quickly and efficiently. I know that given 5 hours, I can make a wonderful 3D model, light it and output a film... but what is really needed is something good enough in 1 hour so i can move into something else.
In a weeks time I am running 2 half day INSET's (Teacher training) in using Sketchup. One will be focused on using tricks and tactics to quickly create quality visuals from Sketchup in as short a time as possible.
So what's juggling got to do with this? Well, those who can't juggle. when questioned why , start by saying they don't have the skill, then after a few more excuses they inevitably end up with... "Because I haven't practiced".
ICT is especially cruel for this because it requires memory of where tools are and what they do, combined with experience of using them. There is no substitute for time and therefore I hope that next weeks INSET will result in staff practising themselves, becoming expert, and inspiring GCSE students to produce good and quick results. A whizz bang graphic is only part of a portfolio... and therefore should only have part of the time spent on it so encourage your students to practise now, so they can knock out that required visual quickly when the time comes.

Let it rip...

2009-01-05T11:15:00.002Z

Sometimes it is nice to just knock out a drawing or design just for the fun of it. This is a chair I designed way back when I studied furniture design for a few years. My friend can make you one if you are interested, but it will cost you £1000 delivered!

I used numerous tricks within sketchup and in a DTP program to get the final image.

Contact me if you want to know how its done, or want to buy half a dozen chairs and the matching table...

Keep it Simple!

2009-01-05T11:00:00.004Z

It takes a lot of effort to make something complex, but sometimes it takes just as much to make something simple.

I have an idea for a project which requires various sized catapults as part of an all day physics, technology and social skills event I am offering to my clients. The medium and large catapult designs, as outline ideas for students to improve further, were relatively easy to design, but until now the tiny version eluded me. You cannot just miniaturise the thing because the laws of physics do not scale equally and the bits can be too fiddly to allow it to be built, plus something unbreakable in 50 x 25mm softwood wil be rather fragile when a lot smaller. Look at model steam engines which may be 1/50th of the size of the real thing, but can still pull many people on a track.

Yesterday I came up with this design...

It is just a wooden stick (actually a tongue depressor!) with sticky rubber pads on it. Would take about 5 minutes to make tops, if measured carefully. Capable of firing a 'payload' of a blob of blutak about 2 metres. Angle is adjustable by sticking the feet elsewhere (comparison tests anyone?) and is super cheap to make. You could also put your own markings on the stick to give a range indicator.

It also gives a stable base for firing as many small catapult designs suffer from slipping as the pressure is applied while the rubber feet used here, aided by your finger pressing down hard on the end, keep it in place.

There is an old story that the Americans spent millions perfecting the pressurised ink ball point pen that would write in zero gravity on space flights. The Russians used pencils instead. Whether true or not it demonstrates that just because we can reach for the sunminiature hinges, bolts and exotic materials, doesn't mean we always have to !

Sketchup quality graphics

2008-12-01T16:03:00.003Z

The new free version of Sketchup, V7, is out now and there have been some tweaks here and there but nothing much changed. There are however some extremely good pre made styles you can apply to models.
For those new to styles, these are one click settings that can give you sketchy lines, pastel colours and special backgrounds. there are plenty built into Sketchup but now there are some great ones for presentation that should make pupils work that little bit special.

The one above has had the edge faded in a separate program after being output from Sketchup, but it shows you what you can do with styles, and carefully applied textures.

You can do that with Butter!

2008-11-08T09:35:00.003Z

I have a friend who works in particle physics, x rays and all kinds of stuff. I was chatting to him about an idea I had to teach young people about the consequences of misusing digital information. This became about because I was asked by a client if I could come up with an idea to dissuade young people from giving songs and videos to each other free that someone somewhere had originally pirated. I started researching ways of mechanically recording sound and did some experiments with needles and paper. Haven't cracked it yet but i think i will when I get the recording strip right!
So i am in the pub talking to my scientist friend about this and he says 'you can record sound with a needle on butter'. Its three weeks later and he still has not been able to show me where this has been done!
My recording prototype doesn't use butter, it uses aluminium but I am trying different materials till I get something that is not only workable, but also easily reproducible. I am sure that one off, for one time only, using very careful temperature control techniques someone did manage to record sound onto butter... it seems to me quite feasible, but education needs solutions that work in the real world at room temperature and can be reproduced by others without huge technical skills and budgets!
A good project needs proof and a manual, A rumour is untested!

2008-10-26T09:15:00.002Z

One of my projects at the moment is trying to work out how to use a laser cutter to seal together sheets of material, and cheap ways of laser etching onto metals. I have also recently seen a nutter, HERE, laser etch his fingernails by disabling the safety catches on a laser (note the burned and scarred edges of his fingers before you think this is a good idea!). these are all interesting but sometimes it is the super simple that has the most chance to educate if the learnign goes beyond just the skills to make it.
This keyring design below is a straight forward laser project cut in 3mm acrylic with a 2mm ball bearing inside. It is very cheap and quick to make, can be prototyped in cheaper materials and produces a high quality finished product that would be easily saleable. Provided you go beyond merely designing around a standard pattern, and ensure there is work and progression onto mazes themselves, industrial standard material sizes, opportunities to try multi level mazes (3 stacked on top of each other?) etc.. then this would be a good project.
IF you find yourself knocking out the same old size keyrings and ideas, each barely discernible from the rest, and a good way to tell is whether students need to put their name on them to know which is which, then contact me for some tips!

If nature can do it, why can't I?

2008-10-20T22:29:00.003+01:00

I have in front of me three prototypes for artificial sycamore seeds. Each one is better than the last, but I suspect it will take me about 12 versions to get it right! This is something I have been pondering on recently, which is, just because you know something can be dome, it does not mean it is easy to do..

Example. I have shown Sketchup to anyone who stands still long enough for me to focus on them over the past five years, but still the take up in schools is woefully low. It is a relatively easy piece of software to learn, but still people need help. I am currently running Sketchup trainmg sessions for three clients, including teachers, and it is clear that once people get the basics, they are fine with the rest...

To this end I have developed a set of 10 beginners and 10 advanced Sketchup e-Learning training films for sale. Each has a single task illustrating a particular skill and is carried out on a Sketchup file like the one below. There is a recording sheet to map progress and they are carefully graded. I ran this with 16 teachers in a Twilight Inset in July and it worked extremely well with all levels of staff being able to use the e-Learning films to work at their own pace.

The advanced set are optional and cover shadows, lighting, camera movement and other skills people may need to get the quality output they require.

If you are interested in training, or purchasing a license for a set of films than contact me!

New Ideas

2008-10-20T22:23:00.003+01:00

I am developing some ideas for various clients, and this includes some super simple ones for education where people want a fun activity quick without having to spend ages buying all the equipment and learnign loads of new skills.

one of these is BOUNCE

A simple idea where marbles are bounced along a series of drums with rubber stretched over the top. Like so many things, it really needs a lot of background development to get it working. this came from an idea I saw when I was a child in a friends house. I quickly found that getting the right rubber membrane and holder was essential if you were going to make a reproducible set-up. I solved it by using widely available specialist parts and if the client decides to fund it, I will post a link to the scheme of work some time in 2009 here.

Ballcoaster project

2008-10-20T22:13:00.003+01:00

Something I have been working on for a while and has recently had its pilot session has been the BallCoaster. This is a kit of parts from which a roller coaster can be constructed.

It was a pilot on the 22nd of September at the Engineering Centre in Top valley, Nottingham. Ballcoaster is funded by and owned by Nottingham Science City and has proved a tough task now solved.

The parts seem simple, a set of foam brackets holding a hosepipe but there has been some serious engineering and research to get it to work. The hose is a special type which is extremely flexible but still retains its round section when bent otherwise it would slip out of the foam brackets grip. The brackets are a 'standard' industrial foam cut by waterjets by a specialist company. The resulting kit works extremely well but DOES NOT make it overly easy for the students. They have to work together to get it working. My favourite parts are the weights for the adjustable brackets, made of socks filled with gravel, and the adjustable height levellers for the track which are 300 x 200 x 100mm cardboard standard boxes. Both items are extremely cheap and demonstrate that sometimes things can be simple, and seriously effective!

There is a complete blog with downloadable manual and videos I have written HERE, email me what you think and contact Science City Nottingham, Ian Tringali, if you want to buy kits or get some training yourselves.

Hello after a long gap

2008-10-20T22:12:00.001+01:00

It has been many months since the last post. Ironically Ihave been contributing to many blogs, and even built a couple of new ones for clients, but rigth now I intend to jeep this weekly at least!
watch this space!

Childrens services

2008-04-20T23:28:00.002+01:00

Spent the day on Saturday last in Yorkshire. Part of it at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. There were 5 children in our party but woefully little to do there apart from look. The place is amazing, but with what appeared to be only visual treats on offer, the children soon got bored. EVERYTHING was off limits and not to be touched, climbed on or experienced beyond visually...

I had taken along some prototype planes to do when the children got bored, but as we flew them outside, away from the sculptures, we were instructed not to do so anywhere in the (enormous) grounds or buildings as games were not allowed in any part...

To me this typifies much of our reaction to children and creativity. they must observe it, parrot it, possibly even take part in it, but on the terms of the providers. Given the clearly multi multi million pound cost of the park and buildings, some little could and should have been set aside for a games area, or a playground, or an activity. The park announces on its website that it is fully booked for school parties this year, There were lots of children on Saturday... and nothing for them to do and little reason to stay or come again.

The YSP is not alone in this. Often children's activities are relegated behind everything else that an organisation does. And when they do put on activities, they rarely attract those who need convincing. For, to use the popular vernacular, It was a 'chav' free zone.... and maybe it was the poorer for that!

Fantastic Card Gliders

2008-03-15T09:22:00.004Z

Another new product available at my AJ Box website is Pop-Glider.
This is a class set of 35 glider kits in a tough card box. This is not available at present to buy direct, but I am seeking partnerships with various educational suppliers to stock it. Minimum order is a 4 cases, each containing 20 class sets. I have free samples I can send out so contact me if you are interested.

The gliders are extremely tough and very easy to assemble, but have all the adjustable bits you find on a plane, and can be further enhanced using just paper and glue to fly even better.

They are made in a special heavy duty corrugated card which has been die-cut (No scissors, parts just pop-out, and are glued with paper glue and slot together) with a safety edge on critical parts. The glider is white and can be coloured with normal pens / pencils and paints. The gliders are hand or rubber band launched and fly extremely well as standard, before you even start making them better with little tweaks and adjustments.

Full instructions, films, suggested lesson activities and a brilliant list of other websites with companion activities is on the AJ Box website.

New Products and Website lauched

2008-03-15T09:13:00.005Z

Bit if a long time since the last Blog... Been rather busy! Will be blogging more often now!

Have now set up a new companion website and company called AJ Box ltd. This website lists all the products I can now sell which I have developed.

The first three products are :
Think-Scuttle A kit with tools and all parts to run a project building clockwork creatures
Think-Light A kit with tools and all parts to investigate different light sources and design new uses for them
Think-SumoBox A kit with all tools and parts to run a project building and battling motorised 'bots'

All three projects are available as 6 user packs, and soon in 36 user packs. they have enough parts, tools and materials for the users to make a number of projects each, and can easily be shared between young people. For example, a team of 3 producing a 'SumoBox' bot so a 6 user kit would work with up to 18 people to deliver 5-6 hours of focussed activity. All kits come with a comprehensive set of resources on CD-ROM including training films, presentations, blank worksheets and photos and video of exemplars.

All three of these are available NOW from the University if the First Age
They are also taking bookings for a series of training events which I am running, giving direct instruction in how to run the above courses, complete with an in-depth course tutors manual which I have written.

Industrial relations

2007-12-04T08:48:00.000Z

I am in the process of getting industrial quote for kits to make the cardboard cam designs shown below. I have an industrial background, but I have been struck by the difficulty of dealing with industry, even with my insiders perspective. Even when you understand whats going on and request a quote, you may not be able to read it or fully understand the implications of buying tooling or delivery schedules because many industries have arcane practises such as'looking after the mould for you' or You ordered a thousand but we deliver by the pallet load and thats 800, or We need space to drive the 42 ton delivery lorry and for the forklift truck to offload at your (ware) house. I have sorted these problems out in good time, but it reminds me of a practical exercise I did with a group of yr11 pupils, studying Resistant materials.

Using a speakerphone, they phoned up a local branch of B&Q and asked for Medium Density Fibreboard, 2400mm x 1200 mm x 12mm and got a price of £14. Another pupil then phoned up ten minutes later and asked for 8' x 4' x 1/2" MDF and got a price of £18. Interesting result as they are exactly the same thing!

Forunately the internet has made it a great deal simpler since then to get comparative price quotes, but as with any aspect fo life, the first time you do something, it will always be more intense and take much longer than later!

Here are a few things described industrially for you to guess what they are... and where they are used

Gross of No.2 BZP Twinfast CSK 15mm

Parana 44mm PAS 2.4m

100W BC cap

2x2GB DDR2

16x 4.7GB

Answers later

Sketchup Course

2007-11-13T11:51:00.000Z

Almost daily, people are amazed by the breadth of uses to which Sketchup can be put. Roman buildings, bridges, comparing volume in mathematics etc.. Therefore I have decided to work with the Top valley And Nat Puri Engineering Centre in Nottingham, UK, to offer a one day course in Sketchup, and how it can creatively be used to bolster teaching.

You may be a PE teacher wishing to make 3D tactics boards or a school thinking about a new extension. maybe a graphics or food teacher wanting to put pupils packaging designs on actual 3D boxes and then on a supermarket shelf. You may be a teacher of history who wants to use 3D models of planes such as the Wright Brothers flyer to show how brave these people were, or a geaography teacher wanting pupils to assess the impact of a new supermarket by placing a model in Google Earth.

There are a choice of two dates, 4th December 2007 and 22nd January 2008. It costs £135 including a buffet lunch. For full details, please phone 0115 953 9060 and ask for the Engineering Centre

Stop Motion animation Ideas

2007-09-10T10:39:00.000+01:00

This short film shows a Stikfa figure being used to create 'lifelke' movement. Stikfas have roughly the same range of joints and movements in their main limbs that we have. This makes them ideal for stop motion animation.
Knocked this film up in 40 minutes using a cheap webcam, edited using Windows movie Maker, titles also added with movie maker and output as a 320 x 240 15fps wmv file
If you want more info, email me!

2007-09-05T22:43:00.000+01:00

This caught my eye today - Very big in Japan and usually, where Japan leads, we tend to follow a few years later.
This blotch is a type of 2D (reads vertically and horizontally) barcode. By itself that is nothing new... BUT, there is free software available for almost all cameraphones which can extract the data from a snapshot picture.
You may wonder why this is so revolutionary, but the patch on the left contains 250 characters of information which is directly readable by a computer (which is what your phone is).

Normally the picture would have to be processed using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software which extracts the data... QR Code is translated directly into computer readable information.
Imagine you are shopping and see a coat you like, you take a picture of you wearing it, but if you also take a picture of the 'QR' code on the label. This tells you the size, colour and other information in a format that your phone can store and transmit onwards by bluetooth or other technologies. being a picture, you can also send it in an MMS message, or convert it to text and txt it. There are various radio and tracker technologies available which are better than this.. but none cost almost nothing to implement... What about introducing this on all your pupils project sheets, or devise a hunting game where people had to track down clues by deciphering previous clues stuck to walls and ceilings?

For the record.. this is what the QR code says... and below is the link to generate your own!!

"This is a demo of a QR code generation image. It was created using the Kaywa free online code generator software and allows up to 250 characters (letters and spaces) to be embedded in the code and read by almost any cameraphone or scanner - ajbooker"

http://qrcode.kaywa.com/

Real Product Design

2007-08-31T13:58:00.000+01:00

Teaching product design is a pain if you want pupils to make something they can test working that isn't a bottle opener or a hanger... The film here shows a small radio typically bought for £1 in the UK used as the basis for a project.

Here is the link mentioned in the video

In later blogs I will be showing you files and ideas for turning this into a product design project for year 9 and 10 (Ages 13-15) and a few tips on construction.

If you find this Blog useful, please be one of those who email me with feedback! I listen and adjust my posts according to your needs!

Teaching Mass and Inertia - with Skittles!

2007-08-07T14:32:00.000+01:00

Needed a quick game to introduce concepts of design ideas, mass and inertia when visiting a primary school. Came up with this using a small bag of skittles sweets.

First I put a few skittles on each table and then asked people to stand by the table which had the most red, least yellow etc. Then explained that sometimes we came up with a design idea we were absolutely right was the best one. Then asked them to stand by the table with three sweets of the same colour. This time there was a couple of tables and used this to explain that sometimes there was more than one good idea and you had to choose the one you liked the best (flavour in this case!)

Then I put some masking tape a third of the way up the table and they played a game where they had to flick the sweets up the table into the green area beyond the tape. Any in that area got eaten by the 'flicker', all others including those which fall off the table are eaten by the opposing player. Used this to explain what mass was and how friction affected mechanisms. the rest of the afternoon we made clockwork mechanisms and referred back to the skittles experiment frequently.

Afterwards I thought, what a great idea! Took the idea to another school the next week and it bombed.... because no sweets were allowed to be given to kids and Kidney beans just don't work properly... If I was doing this with staff, I would use dark chocolate covered coffee beans and watch the opponents get more hyper as the caffeine kicked in!

New ways of learning

2007-08-06T13:03:00.001+01:00

I ran a 3D graphics event in June for Gifted and Talented Children from across the Midlands. It was in how to use the free 3D program, Google Sketchup. It consists of about 14 units, each with sample files and an e-learning film showing how to use the particular skills taught in that unit.

I am in discussions to sell these films as a personal / group learning resource and they will soon be available to purchase online and download a set.

In the meantime, here's some screen dumps of the power point presentation and various models used in the films.

Computer Control for primary Schools

2007-07-17T09:36:00.000+01:00

Recently advised a Primary School on what control equipment to buy to introduce the topic to staff and pupils. Went through 4 systems, starting with simple circuit boards you set up a sequence of commands with for about £6 each, through to specific education systems costing about £120. At the end, the head asked me..yes.. but whats the best system? I advised her it was 'LEGO NXT' and she promptly bought 5 kits. I hadn't included this in my list of 4 initially because of cost, but i think she chose wisely!

This may be a suprising choice for many schools, and certainly is not the cheapest option, being around £1000 for 5 kits and a site license for the essential NXT Mindstorms software, but it has many advantages. The pupils are not scared of breaking it, they are already skilled in assembling the components, the leads used are robust and cheaply replaced if they do break. Replacement parts are all numbered and cheap to buy, and finally, it is compatible with every other LEGO brick in the world.

Of course there are a a few downsides... 471 pieces, many tiny, is a big classroom managements headache so I suggested they bought some rather oversized rolling toolboxes big enoughto store all the bits, and with room for part built models in the base.

My favouite piece of techhie kit for school is the Roamer, a simple big disc shaped thing with buttons on. Someone very clever decided it should be powered by those huge square lantern batteries and therefore it went for ages and could be stored ina cupboard without losing charge... You can still buy them..but I would now buy NXT!

Short Change

2007-07-15T18:50:00.000+01:00

I wrote a set of Structures worksheets for a DT department a few years ago that needed to be taught by all staff, regardless of technical ability in structures.

The sheets went through the basic types of structures and used only 'spills' the thin wooden sticks used to light Bunsen burners, and plasticine, along with a bit of paper and some wooden blocks for weights. It proved very successful but I noticed some of the kids did not use the materials in correct ways because the long sticks with their flat absorbent surfaces stuck to the plasticine so well that quite bizarre angles could be made, and the flat sticks could be stuck together along their length to make very rigid pieces.

In the last few weeks, I have developed a similar structures project using a set of 7 photocopied card project sheets onto which pupils build directly. I used plasticine again ( Actually 'modelling clay' as its much cheaper and the same stuff!) but this time used cocktail sticks which I bought very cheaply from www.rapidonline.com. The shorter sticks have a round cross section and are non-absorbent which means pupils ideas need building more carefully with proper triangulation if they are to be weight supporting structures.

The idea still needs refining, but I only asked for self-supporting structures, and in hindsight, they should have been load bearing ones. Often picking something common but tricky to hold works well, such as a packet of skittles sweets.

Gearbox Grindings

2007-07-09T10:26:00.000+01:00

I have developed this gearbox for a client who is working in partnership with a power generation company and wishes to promote renewable energy information.

The gearbox uses extremely cheap PVC gears available from http://www.rapidonline.com/ and http://www.mutr.co.uk/ which come as a set of three gears to push fit onto a 3mm shaft and a pinion gear to push fit onto a standard 2mm electric motor shaft. I came up with the idea because the gearboxes already available needed a lot of parts and used fairly small gears, and cost a lot. As regular readers will know, bringing costs down to schools is essential as then projects can be individual or small group and be integreated into the regular SOW of a school.

The front and back plates are manufactured on a laser, but can also be made on a router using a 2mm cutter. The bolts holding it together are standard M4 ones, and the motor used as a power generator is a standard large size solar motor (http://www.mutr.co.uk/) .

It can be built with three combinations of gears giving ratios between 1:3 and 1:14 approx. These arc easily changed in about 3 minutes.

The total cost in parts to a school is about £2 and having fairly chunky gears with big teeth, it is robust. The longer plate, on the production version, is designed to be cut in 3mm plywood so that the gearbox can be screwed to a pole and then stuck in the ground for testing.

The client and I will be offering this design to a manufacturer to produce a kit in bulk. It is hoped that many schools can then benefit from this project.

Decent Coffee!

2007-07-05T10:05:00.000+01:00

Since going full time as a consultant this January, I have worked in a lot of Cafe's and drunk a lot of coffee! This is because much of my development is better done in environments which are stimulating, so there is the table by the lake in Nottingham University, the Garden centre near Wollaton and the non-smoking pub which has free wireless access. Sitting in a box produces boxy ideas... Of course, lugging a 5kg laptop and bag around means I do not have a lot of license to wander around while set-up... so hence my new interest in Expresso. Proper Espresso, as described to me in a book by a fanatical chef, is tiny, not bitter, and has a 'crema', the bit that's a little frothy on top, that supports a teaspoon of sugar for up to 10 seconds.

Temperature, water, cleanliness of the cup, pressure, type and amount of Coffee and the amount it is 'tamped' before being put in one of those gargantuan machines are all critical.

It also means you don't have to nip to the loo all the time to eject excess fluids, leaving your laptop behind!

So why talk about Coffee on a Technology Blog? Because many of the stages in making a decent cup of coffee are ideal for a cross curricular project... Maths does the costings, ICT records temperature and pressure, Science collates, DT produces the perfect measure and 'tamperer'.
Even better, it is a project with an easily assessed outcome, using relatively cheap ingredients which almost anybody can give a qualitative and quantitative judgement on.... I also think the various Coffee companies littering the high street would jump, if properly presented' at the chance to do such a project and reap the substantial PR!

And finally, think how much livelier the staff room would be with all those free espresso samples available!

Laser Cutting

2007-07-04T11:58:00.000+01:00

This little device was an idea I had a few years ago when first getting access to the type of small scale laser now common in secondary schools.

I developed this prototype over many hours and the final CAD file took about 12 minutes to cut on a 40w laser in 3mm plywood.

When I contacted companies to make it in bulk, I quickly discovered why making things in wood was rare today. Unless I had special patterns made in China to stamp out the pieces, and it wasn't certain such fine detail would be reproduced using this method, it would have to be cut out on industrial lasers in this country. It worked out about £12 a set of pieces cut which gave a final selling price in the shops of around £47 by the time other costs and the shops markup + VAT was added.

The sad thing is, I could have all the pieces made as plastic injection moulded parts for £1 (Flat plate mouldings) if I committed to buying 10,000 sets. This would give a final selling price in my targetted shops of about £7 which was acceptable. Of course, then it would be in plastic instead! We will rely less on plastic when it is either too expensive, or there are good industrial techniques and materials to replace it. I suspect we will reach that point in about 20 years.

If you do some research, you will find the most popular early plastic was Bakelite... And that was mostly sawdust! Of course, the second most popular..and available thousands of years before Bakelite..was tortoise shell!

Anyone want to try something new?

2007-07-01T20:48:00.000+01:00

For the past 3 months I have sweated over a set of 4 schemes of work (units) for the University of the First Age, that teachers can take and use to run courses with children, and they are finally finished.

There are four. Pow-Zap, about using super capacitors.
Kinetic, about building large water powered sculptures.
NXT-H20, about solving a design problem using the LEGO NXT system.
2-Tak e, design ing and prototyping an alternative bicycle load carrier.

If you contact the UFA, they should be able to give you more details about the units, and you might like to try running them yourself. The units contain a full SOW, technical details, online bookmarks, oodles of 3D models and 2D sketches, as well as powerpoint introductions and worksheets where required. The Schemes of Work alone run to about 36 pages so there's plenty of material to guide you!

TINY PICAXE DICE - MODULAR

2007-07-01T09:15:00.001+01:00

The dice shown here is part of a set of 5 PCB's I developed in 2006 for a client. These haven't been tested yet so I am not sure if they will work as the client was intending to get pupils to trouble shoot them before a final version. They were created in 'Real PCB', a package I have used and up to now has been pretty similar to the other main educational PCB design package, 'PCB Wizard'.

I think I should express an interest in PCB 'Wizard' and its excellent successor, Circuit Wizard. I did some paid work for the company who makes the programs, but was hired after I was already using it with GCSE and KS3 pupils because of its excellence.

So why the dice picture? Firstly, I love to see how tiny I can make PCB's which are still usable / editable by pupils, and that are easily made as single sided boards. This one is about 45mm x 35mm if you stack the boards. With a little ingenuity, it should be possible to use a tiny 6 or 12v car alarm battery to power it and squeeze the whole onto the PICAXE PCB. I believe that with sample projects such as this that pupils learn on / with, it is important that you can see where the tracks go and understand how it works.

Secondly, It is part of a system where the base 8 pin PICAXE board acts as the starter for pupil projects, and they design the add-on bit. This may seem less satisfactory than designing the whole thing on one board, but as PICAXE 'headers' are part of all common PCB design packages, making it a discrete board seemed neater. It also means pupils are designing just the interface / outcome, not grappling with the whole board. Such an approach can give rise to track routing problems but there is no reason why connections on the pupil board could not be spaced around it rather than lined up in a row.

Thirdly, To tell you that there is a new version of Circuit Wizard due imminently. this will integrate together Circuit diagram, PCB layout and PICAXE programming into one interface. Then I will not have to wait for someone to test the idea above by building it. Instead it will be fully tested from within a single program. If it was available now, this article would be posted on my main website rather than here as a concept item!

I think that electronics has been the area of DT that has seen the biggest changes in the last 5 years. It is now extremely close to industrial methods of designing / testing and manufacturing one-off / prototype devices. Perhaps with the advent of such sophisticated technologies in schools, we should re-examine exactly which GCSE pupils should study. I was required to change to Product Design a few years ago from Electronics but still teach a mainly electronics based content. It wasn't a brilliant fit of subject and syllabus at the time, but it may prove ideal with such powerful software becoming mainstream.

Cheap Outcomes

2007-06-21T08:27:00.002+01:00

I have a value I try to work to for the projects I develop for schools, especially Primary schools, of £1. Almost anyone can buy a kit costing £6 a child and produce a 'fun' activity, but to be sustainable, the building has to be part of a scheme / project and also cheap enough that it can be repeated each year and the results sold to the pupils (Allowed if the pupils take resources home).
This wind turbine as shown costs about 50p in bits, though I have used a rather expensive laser cutter to make the hub. If you use hand cut card circles for the hub, you have an extremely effective turbine which can be pushed through a cardboard box (Add beads to the shaft to act as a bearing or spacer) and you can add a pulley to make other mechanisms turn / move. They really work well. Put in the wind or in front of a fan, they spin extremely fast which is magic to a young child.

There is part of my work that is about new, shiny,cutting edge ideas. Things like this primary turbine remind me that to every class, every year, these are new projects they have never had the chance to try before. By keeping the cost down, everyone gets to make one and proudly take them home.

Chip Tray Hovercraft

2007-06-19T08:35:00.001+01:00

This is an idea I developed for a client for Yr8 Engineering lessons. Having tried the chip tray hovercraft layout in TEP (http://www.tep.org.uk/) I had problems getting it to work as advertised. Found out I had the wrong power supercapacitor. Even though the one i had was labelled 2.5v and 10F (From the official supercap kit from http://www.mutr.co.uk/) , it was a third the size of another from http://www.rapidonline.com/ which was labelled the same. Turns out the bigger one had three times the capacity (time able to run things). It was also the same price as the smaller one and worked with 15p motors from Rapid. Once I swapped for the bigger capacitor, everything became easy. This version uses sticky pads and connector blocks and can be assembled in about half an hour. The information on making it that the pupils received didn't quite work. On purpose, the design made the hovercraft a little rear heavy and they had to resite / cut the card cowl to get it working effectively. Look at my earlier posts to find out about the magnetic connectors.

This model was, of course, done in Sketchup. It tested my ingenuity to draw a decent chip tray in Sketchup (Try It!) but once everything was in 3D, it was relatively easy to arrange the parts for powerpoint slides, exploded views etc. I have taken the same approach to recent work for other clients. A wind turbine I have developed for KS3 is a 3D model which allows me to very quickly generate pictorial worksheets.

The backgrounds are black because the files are actually .gif files with transparent backgrounds. Saved and placed over other graphics in PowerPoint, they work beautifully but Blogger does not support this feature.

Effective vehicle platform

2007-06-18T07:37:00.000+01:00

Schools are often seeking a simple way of building cars and other wheeled vehicles without the complications of sorting axles and pulleys which can prove tricky for very small hands. Pupils, especially in primary school, want to build things that actually climb over sticks, go up 'hills' and 'work'.

This example uses a common module availble from www.rapidonline.com (Code 37-0310), and www.mutr.co.uk (Code TG1 010), for about £1.35. Partner with a simple battery box with built in switch (Sold by both rapid and mutr) and a couple of wheels and you have an inexpensive 'platform' for creating a strong capable vehicle.

And if you are worrying about costs, you can normally re-use all parts with care, or charge the pupils as if they're idea is good, and they are proud of it, virtually all pupils will bring in some money towards the cost!

Suspension Bridge

2007-06-11T20:57:00.000+01:00

Here is an idea I am developing.

The bridge is made out of standard sizes / cuts of plywood and MDF. The finished packed bridge fits on the back seat 0f a standard car and should be liftable by two people.

Weights are foldable water containers.

With 100 litres (100KG) of water in each box, these act as the foundations the bridge is built off.

Participants work in teams of up to 10, competing against another team building another bridge, to build a working suspension bridge. Bridges are between 10 and 14 metres long...

Only consumable is the water, and a big ball of string!

This model wass built in Sketchup in 1 hour from scratch!

To test they must drive a glass of water over it on the back of a radio controlled car. Speed to cross and water left equals score usign a formula.

Should be building a prototype before the end of July 2007, and rolling it out to schools in East Nottingham City next academic year!

Edutainment?

2007-06-07T17:18:00.000+01:00

Well meaning friends bought me a quiz programme for my Birthday recently. It proudly boasted 400 questions and after doing a standard test on it I came to the following conclusions

I am not good at intelligence tests
I could learn to be better at them
This program was not going to help me get better

After completing 40 questions, the program baldly told me what I'd got wrong but not why or how it should have been answered. Bad Consultancy is like that... you can tell people what's wrong, but not how to make it better. What I did learn, is that the disc flies really,really well.

Communication Strategies

2007-06-06T09:50:00.000+01:00

I am writing this from home with a temperature and a sore throat which means Voice recognition software and recording voice-overs for e-learning films are very out!

This is a bit disconcerting because on Saturday i am running a whole day training event in Sketchup for 25 people and I have not been able to record the e-learning films for any of it yet as the clock ticks closer.

What this delay has done is force me to consider alternative strategies and consider if they are really 'second-best'. i have access to extremely sophisticated screen recording software but it is time consuming compared to clicking and speaking. Maybe what i will do in the end is reduce the amount of talking, even getting others to say prepared statements out loud which I will line up with the film in Windows movie maker. The result will probably be better precisely because it will be 'considered' instruction rather than a continuous stream of dialogue.

Also of course, the most melodious voice may eventually pale after a couple of hours of solid instruction. As they say... Out of adversity comes invention!

Micro Radio Controlled Airships

2007-06-05T08:30:00.001+01:00

I bought a £5 radio control car at Christmas and have an idea to use the core mechanism to make a miniature radio control airship. I have run two radio control airship clubs in the past as Pupil/Parent activities, but they are restricted by the weight of the radio control equipment. Typically they used standard 2 channel radio gear and needed to use about 2 cubic metres to be effective. Go here for a film of them.

Using commercially available balloon gas which is 95% Helium, you get a lift of about 1kg per cubic metre. This is the TOTAL lift though so the weight of the envelope (Bit that contains the gas) and the radio gear and batteries and everything else must be lifted. The new generation of micro-cars weigh a few grams and it should be possible to build a simple airship with them. These pictures show some outline details. using the core module from the car. i expect the final airship to be around 1 metre long. If anyone is interested in more detail or wishes to sponsor a pilot, and receive full building details and a scheme of work then please contact me.

Super Capacitors and Polarisation

2007-06-01T13:40:00.001+01:00

Supercaps are small battery like components. You connect them to power, they soak up some and then you can connect them to other devices. They don't store lots of power, but enough to run a simple motor for a couple of minutes maybe.

I am presently writing 4 units of work for The University Of The First Age based in Birmingham but actually countrywide in their influence. I needed a way to simply join super capacitors to motors etc. and have come up with this idea using the 'magnetic connectors' sold by www.mutr.co.uk and combining them with the standard 10 Amp electrical connecor blocks

It means you cannot (If wired correctly) connect the wires the wrong way round (Their Polarity) which means less chance of damaging these useful but expensive (£4 each) components!

Growing Ideas

2007-06-01T13:01:00.000+01:00

Plant a seed, take care, watch and see it grow!

Today I read an article by a senior educationalist saying Pilot projects sshow that if you have an idea, run by interested people, with good financial backing... they make a positive difference to a child's education.

Pretty obvious, the trick is to spread that difference beyond the carefully nurtured 'pilot' ground.

I am organising a wind turbine pilot at the moment and one key outcome is reproducibility. I have worked with teachers to secure funding for one pilot, a fact finding series of trips for pupils, teacher development and training for the pilot, and finally two teacher training events at which we will give participants at least 2 cd's of material and multiple kits to take away and use in their own classrooms. In this way the project should grow beyond its initial pilot stage.

I have in front of me a £1500 cd/dvd automated disc copying machine and printer. With this, organisations hosting events can give teachers multiple copies of info to give to others. I thought at first that hosting the stuff online was the answer but writing and hosting huge media websites is far more time consuming and ultimately costly than knocking out a few CD's at less than £1 each. Some materials will go on youtube but most will be on the CD.

A pilot is like growing seeds in a greenhouse under ideal consitions... It will almost always work! The next stage is to find out how to grow those seeds in real soil and still get a good crop. All my future bids to funders will include teacher training events from now on.. to get them out of the greenhouse!

G&T D&T?

2007-05-31T15:05:00.000+01:00

I am presently thinking about how a primary school can assess its pupils for Gifted ad Talented status in Design Technology. Sport, maths and other G&T areas are fairly simple, but what are you measuring for D&T?

I have chosen to pick three areas: Manual Dexterity, tested through assembling a simple kit, Organisation through how well they plan the kit assembly, and design through their proposed and recorded amendments to the kit.

This is a new activity in my consultancy but it builds upon the concept of Technology Education being about identifying needs and producing solutions.

As for what kit they will assemble, it is likely to be a simple Meccano clone. Spanners ready!

Engineering Centre Garden

2007-05-31T14:39:00.001+01:00

Part of my weekly work is to be business and development manager of the only school based engineering centre in the country. The centre has only been open a few months and was still being sorted when it opened. Now an area at the front of the building is being turned into a 'garden' and seating area for visitors and young people being trained there.

So, I am asked about plants for the centre and immediately we see probelms. Blackberries are good as they are food plants but quickly the walls and carpets would turn purple.

Pyrocanthus would be a good choice as it is spiky and evergreen but would require care as again, the berries can be used for ammunition!

In the end we are going to choose a variety of plants but it is a good chance to realise that design is in every decision, not just the ones relating to hard materials!

Moan at the darkness

2007-05-31T14:38:00.001+01:00

This is the first blog so here's to the future!

I ran an INSET this week for 11 people. As I am not a primary teacher, I feel it is wrong of me to give them in-depth schemes of work. As agreed with the client beforehand, the event focussed on analysing some QCA schemes to dump the verbiage and produce a clear concise list of 'objectives'.
Adding any stages necessary to turn it into a smooth flow gives you a rough scheme of work.

While planning for the event, I realised that the average QCA project is 1750 words long by itself. This doesn't include any DATA help files or exemplar work! And this is only one of many subjects a primary teacher will study to deliver.... Lets hope future curriculum reviews will recognise this.

The INSET also included a goodie bag for each participant. £10 worth of bits which will enliven teaching of DT without breaking the bank.... I will post the list and presentation on my website in June.

It was a hot day today in Nottingham and I took the group outside for half an hour. No power point and no teaching aids, just a circle of chairs and the sun in our eyes!

INSET is a time for reflection and discussion as well as learning. I have noticed recently that those teachers who should be in the best position to inspire their younger colleagues can sometimes major more on the downsides of teaching than the positives which can be very destructive when their younger colleagues are looking for reassurance.
I find teachers bemoaning their world and being less than open in taking on 'new ideas' difficult.

I spoke passionately but not necessarily eloquently about teachers needing to enjoy their subject, that fun was communicable to pupils and that we have to practise skills ourselves, much like we expect our pupils to, before we get better and gain confidence in new things.

Of course, it is much easier to preach these things than do them, it is easier to moan about the darkness..than light a candle!