WordWand

WordWand will be available in the new Kitronik Catalogue arriving at some 2500 schools during the first half of September 2009
It consists of a PCB with components and a huge array of free downloadable resources from my www.ajbox.co.uk website
Wordwand can be programmed with up to 16 characters, depending on your programming skills, but works best with about 4 characters in a message. The free resources will include a basic and in-depth presentation, 2 page starter and full 10 page Teachers guide, 5 sample programs in Circuit Wizard format (You will need version 1.5 onwards to view) and also sample programs in the free 'Genie Design Studio' program that is a free flowsheet editor and programmer that is virtually identical to the flowsheet programming within Circuit Wizard
I hope that having a useful project that is customisable to each student, comes with lashings of free resources and is relatively cheap, PIC will start to be used in many more schools in the UK. At its best it is a wonderful project where creativity and problem solving combine to produce an effective learnng tool, at its worst, as shown to me by a friends son who did PIC at his school last term, it is a bent piece of plastic with 4 lights that flash for no reason whatsoever that the pupil cannot fathom a real use for!

Who owns what?

Was surfing today, looking for useful apps and came across a new site...

Apparently a new way to search through the gazillions of free 3D models on the Net. So I did a search for a few obvious things and there were spaceships and chimpanzees and bridges etc.. A lot of the stuff is serious commercial models costing anythign up to £1000's because the work which goes into them.
Then like all good Bloggers everywhere, I typed in my name, and got THIS
This is a list of all the FREE models I placed on Google Sketchup Warehouse. Now that is fine, I put them online knowing they would be free to everyone to download from 'warehouse', but I did not expect them to appear on a third party site like this, freely searchable alongside paid content. Maybe I should, information we upload often includes 'ownership' clauses that essentially gives it away. this applies to the images in this blog as much as those 3d models.
So when you develop work with your students, and place it on a showcase online, be aware that it may pop up somewhere unexpected! But that's the net for you...