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.
We've been putting the latest toys through the ringer again ... for the upcoming Drone Racing course, we wanted to find the best drone that fitted our criteria. It had to be:
Last day at our Brockhurst Tech Camp today and the children have been adding "mods" to their laser guns. Most popular were extensions to the stocks and improvements to the sights (more aesthetic than functional, but they looked cool). I'm so often impressed by the kid's creativity, and what they can come up with given a few bits of pipe, some foam board and some glue!
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.
Do you have a computer whizz on your hands? Would your child love to meet new friends who are also interested in technology?
If you’re based in London or Winchester, your child is always welcome at one of our technology camps. We offer a huge choice of courses which are ideal for any budding inventor.
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.
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.
Learning coding for kids is a really important skill, and is becoming more and more recognised as something to be encouraged and taught from an early age. But why learn to code with Python? Why is it such a popular choice for summer camps and schools all around the country
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 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.
"I started at Tech Camp firstly as a camper in 2008. As a child at the time I loved creating small robots and coding, but my parents had struggled to find anywhere I could work on advanced projects like this outside the home until they discovered Tech Camp."