Edinburgh 2012

18 November 2012

Last day of the Tech Train today! We've had a great week, seeing all sorts of science demonstrations, and participating in a variety of workshops from Lego Mindstorms to biotechnology. Today was mainly sightseeing, with trips to the Camera Obscura and Edinburgh Castle. Tonight we will be having a tour of the underground medieval streets before heading back to London on the sleeper train.

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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.

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.

Easter Camp

Just finished our Easter Test Pilot again and had a terrific time. We had an Easter event last year but this time around we wanted to run a really small event just to try out our new courses for 2016. We figured this would both give us an incentive to develop the courses in a more detailed manner longer before the summer and also to be able to use the feedback of the campers to improve things for when we’re inundated with hundreds of campers in a few months’ time.

Crazy Contraption Day

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!

Cheltenham Science Festival 2012

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Why Kids Should Learn to Build Robots

Fifteen years ago, if someone had started speaking about a robot, many people would probably have had in my mind a resemblance of C-3PO. A shiny human-shaped being that could act on his own carrying out similar tasks to a human.

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Cheltenham Science Festival 2013

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Status of our Summer Camps

At the moment, our summer camps are open for booking as normal. Of course it is possible with COVID19 it may not be possible to run them, but almost all of the parents we've asked so far are keen to keep their bookings open in case that they do go ahead, and we realise what a welcome relief camp will be when all the social distancing is finally gone for children to be out doing something exciting and not being stuck at home!