Tech Camp Blog

Cheltenham Science Festival 2013

10 June 2013

We returned to Cheltenham Science Festival again this year for the family fun weekend, and had an excellent two days with perfect weather! We also took part in the schools workshop programme earlier in the week, debuting our new electricity show and musical Tesla Coil.

The festival was extremely busy at the weekend due to the excellent weather, and our tent was packed with people trying out some laser tag, robot wars, Raspberry Pis, line following robots and our brand new remote control turret gun.

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Maker Faire UK

On Friday night we began the long road trip North to Newcastle for the Maker Faire, with Tech Camp regular Felix and our new employee Pedro, who will be joining us in June. We eventually got to the Centre for Life in Newcastle, an amazing science museum/exhibition space/research facility that was the venue for this year’s UK Maker Faire.

Tesla's Valve

Nikola Tesla is a big name in Science & Technology, long before his name became synonymous with electric vehicles. A legendary engineer, inventor and futurist, Tesla was one of the early pioneers of alternating current and wireless transmission. Although known more for his work with electricity, Tesla had many clever ideas, including one of the most interesting valve designs you might have seen. Here's a modern take on visualising how it works using flammable gasess.

Raspberry Pi Day

We spent today at IBM Hursley, one of IBM's biggest sites in the UK, helping them test out some educational games they were working on. They wanted a bunch of kids to help them with their testing and we were happy to oblige now that the big summer events are all over.

Robots for Abu Dhabi

Jack just finished building up the robots for the Abu Dhabi Science Festival in October. We've made a couple of recent changes; adding a table tennis ball as a coaster on the front, and cutting out some fluorescent vinyl stickers that should look good under the UV light in the arena they are constructing for us.

What's a Typewriter?

As part of our visit to IBM for the Raspberry Pi day we had a tour of IBM's museum. During the tour we were shown some of IBM's typewriters and after a long (but concise) explanation of the development of the typewriter, one of the kids asked what did these 'typewriter' things do? It never struck the rest of us adults that most of the children would never have seen one of these before.

Steady Hand Game for The Science Museum

We've just designed a new kit for The Science Museum and popped in tonight to see how the kids got on. It's for their Science Nights so it had to be simple; they have around 450 kids in each time they run it, in classes of 150 at a time!

Game Design At University: Turn Your Hobby into a Career

The future is here and you no longer have to stick to a core subject to get a great degree! Traditionally, when students think of venturing off to university they deliberate between those courses which are pushed as ‘core’ subjects at school: English, Maths, Biology, Chemistry, Physics - perhaps considering Medicine, Law or Business and Economics as a more ‘adventurous’ choice. However, the world is changing.

A Tech Camp Biosphere - 4 years on!

We recently received an email from one of our campers way back in our second year (2009) when we ran a biotech course. One of the projects was to make your own biosphere, a sealed self-sustaining ecosystem. We would have been impressed with one year, but this one is still going strong after four! If anyone else still has a biosphere, please do send us a picture!

GoPro RC Plane Footage

A few of you may remember our RC planes from Aerospace Camp last year – one of the campers, Matthew Prett, has been making a few alterations since then and not only is it still flying, but he has managed to get some excellent footage from it using a GoPro Hero 3 camera.

For the Uber Electronics Geek ...

OK, so this isn't one for your average 9 year-old, but for a teen (or older) who is REALLY into electronics, this is one amazing book. What makes it more incredible is that it's been the Electronics Bible for several decades already. Tom (Tech Camp's MD) stumbled upon this as a teenager himself (definitely several decades ago), and it's been the go-to reference ever since.

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