We had a great day today at Accenture, running some workshops for their "Bring Your Child to Work" day. We ran three workshops simultaneously; a version of our "Steady Hand" game (pictured), a UV torch workshop, and a session building crazy contraptions using our construction kit that we've been developing.
All of the workshops went down well and were busy. Thanks to Jess for stepping in at the last moment to run the UV workshop!
3D Printing is a rapidly evolving industry, with new products, research and breakthroughs appearing every day. But it’s not all just about printing a new phone case, storage box or small plastic toy – 3D printing technology has a growing number of exciting real-world applications, which are becoming ever more important to businesses all over the world.
In October and November we enjoyed running a couple of different workshops on light. The first one was “Light, Lasers & Illusions”. During the presentation the children discovered how our eyes can be tricked, how we can burst balloons with different coloured lasers, and how a drop of water can be turned into a simple but impressive microscope.
We're at the Abu Dhabi Science Festival running a workshop called "Light Fantastic" and we're having a fantastic time running it! The children are making some amazing light painting images - have a look below to see the images from the gallery. Please note that the gallery has multiple pages - use the 'last' button to go to the most recent ones. We'll be updating these daily.
Just finished the first of our Tech Weekends. We had a great time (and hope the children did as well!) Most of them opted to build a laser tag game gun but Barney chose other kits and it was interesting to see what he was able to do with connecting some off-the-shelf kits. His first one was a siren with adjustable pitch and sound effect.
We had a great day today at Accenture, running some workshops for their "Bring Your Child to Work" day. We ran three workshops simultaneously; a version of our "Steady Hand" game (pictured), a UV torch workshop, and a session building crazy contraptions using our construction kit that we've been developing.
We had a great day today playing with our new construction system at the Old Blue Coat School in Thatcham. Around 25 children helped us test it out and made all manner of contraptions. We were pretty pleased how it worked, although we might redesign the angled plastic connectors as they turned out to be a bit fragile.
The system is designed to be a bit similar to mecano, with a series of different length bars with equally spaced holes in them, that can be joined together. The difference is ours is more suitable for younger children - the pieces are much larger, and instead of nuts and bolts our system uses some very clever plastic rivets. These simply push into the hole, and expand to lock the two holes together - much easier for children to use. They can also be pushed back out from the other side of the hole, and reused as many times as you like. Combined with a series of small plastic brackets, the bars and rivets can be used to make all manner of creations that are quite large in scale very quickly.
Many thanks to all the human guinea pigs who helped out!
In preparation for the Kickstarter of our Invent! Robotics Kit, we have been busy here at Tech Camp HQ designing some fancy new packaging to give a premium-quality kit. We have never been particularly happy with the way the cables are stored in the box - most of the parts are held in with a layer of laser cut foam, but there is a lot of empty space left in the box so the cables (and other parts) end up going everywhere!
After a slightly stressful journey (our train was delayed, the children were very well behaved!) we made it back from Edinburgh on Friday at the end of Tech Train 2013. We had a really fun, interesting (and hopefully educational) week of workshops, shows and sightseeing.
As a parent, it can be difficult knowing where to start when it comes to getting your children started with programming. With more and more schools offering computer science for GCSE, and teaching programming instead of just Microsoft Office during ICT lessons, it has never been more important to get started early!
We’ve recently built up a prototype of our Invent! system (www.inventblocks.com) using the Raspberry Pi. Invent! is a system to rapidly build robots, learn coding in schools, and even prototype inventions by engineers. We’ve now got three versions of the system, each using different microcontrollers.