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.
The only other change was removing the 3xAA battery pack and swapping it with an 18650 rechargeable lithium cell. I had done a quick calculation and worked out that we would probably go through 1000 or so AA cells over the course of the festival. It was originally intended as a cost saving exercise but ended up having some other benefits as well. Although the lithium cell is only 3.7V, it has a much more stable discharge curve than the AA cells and performs considerably better under load, meaning that the robots have better performance, and are also more consistent from unit to unit which makes competition play more fair.
Does your child play too many computer games?
We often have conversations with parents who are worried their child plays too many computer games. Is it as bad as it seems? Believe it or not, playing computer games (within limits!) has some well-researched benefits.
Myself and Tom have spent the week down at Forres Sandle Manor school in the New Forest, running a 'Rockets and Robotics' programme for 14 children. At the end of each year, the school have a 'project week' where all the children choose from a wide range of activities to do for the week, such as cycling, needlecraft, sports and even trips abroad.
Just finishing up at the Cheltenham Science Festival. We've had a great weekend. I've been runing some "Light, Lasers and Illusions" workshops for the Family Programme, and Jack & Felix have been running laser tag with the public in the gardens. Some of the locals were really geared-up for the tech tank, but even with full camouflage some of them still couldn't reach the trigger ...
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.
Does your child love their gadgets and wants to learn more about how technology is developed? If they love experimenting with computers, simply book them onto one of our tech camps in 2018. Tech Camp inspires the next generation of inventors through our coding, electronics and engineering holiday camps for kids.
Tech Camp has a long list of successful former students, many of whom return to teach the next generation of inventors. We pride ourselves in keeping our family ties close and the truth is, many of our tutors want to continue their relationship with Tech Camp despite success in their own careers. Let’s look at a few of our stellar students and how they’ve progressed...
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!
We give you a round-up of some of the most exciting games released in 2020.
Another exciting year for gaming is kicked off to a great start with some fantastic new games, either already released or set to be released. Here is the low-down on some of our personal favourites - maybe some of them can provide you with inspiration for creating your own games!:
Please note that release dates may change due to the current Covid-19 pandemic.
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.
An exciting day today; Tech Camp has taken on it's first employee (well, sort of ...) Jack has been a Tech Camp regular for several years now and has convinced me to take him on for a year as an intern/gap-year student. I'm really looking forward to working with Jack; he is not your regular 18 year old ...