NEW EVIL DETENTIONS IPHONE APP!

Such a long delay between last post but things have been getting very busy here with new stuff for teachers... You can now download the IPHONE EVIL DETENTIONS APP... This has taken me and my programming partner, Screw tape Ltd, about 4 months to write and is available NOW in the App store.


There is a FREE version with 20 cards, a few of which have in-depth instructions and Audio notes, and the FULL version for 59p ($1) which has 30 cards with more added every three months, and all the cards have audio and helpful instructions AND a fab random card picker like a 3D carousel, AND you can choose card by different categories and ratings so if you are looking for a task thats easy to set up, you can choose one with a low equipment rating


Just search for Evil Detentions in the ITUNES store, also works with the newer Ipod Touches and supports high res graphics for Retina displays

Were now investigating revision cards so if you have any interest in these, let me know!

Hands on Parenting

I have run lots of parent / child events. usually after school, they encourage parents to work alongside and in a team with their children and often rebuild relationships that had drifted apart. So much of young peoples lives are through mediums, toys, games, clothes, which overtly or subtly communicate the message that parents are uncool or 'not in the loop' and therefore having little worth hearing. Of course this 'buy me rather than trust those nearest you' culture is eventually outgrown by many and psychologists will tell us it is a natural part of human development, but in the extremely heavily promoted world of 'buy me' culture, parents can feel like an outsider in their own home, constantly buying new things to reforge the link with their children but finding these things separate them even more from them. Step forward Nintendo DS, Electronic Ritalin that shuts your children up for hours.. (Hate them, haven't bought them for my kids!)

Parent / Child events and courses reverse this. Most children crave their parents attention and look up to them, even during those teenage years when they appear to be all sarcasm and rejection... Get them together doing somethign that is new to them both and they start forging links again... In this time of budget cuts, real quality Parent / Child courses are getting rare, but if we lose that link between parents and children learning together and respecting / dicscovering their strengths, we lose the chance to benefit as educationalists from the support from home where students spend 60% of their weekday time

Totally unconnected, Found this wonderful product description on a website where this item, a hat, cost £120 and looked like a felt bag made by a donkey trader.. Read it and weep for those who see this stuff as so deeply important

(This Hat) 'explores the delicate balance of human forms, harmonising the ongoing dialogue between body and soul within his collection. Oversized, almost floating elements are meant to provide space between skin and garment, representing a new spiritual freedom. 'This Brand' eliminates the unnecessary, concentrating on the essentials of shape and form while a lack of buttons and trim heighten the wearer's appreciation of simplicity. Our relationship with nature is seen through colour. White symbolises purity, red is blood and energy and black is thoughtfulness -the beginning, the end and what is yet to be discovered. '

Hmmmmmmmmmmm

Simplicity or complexity - Depth Matters

This is a project I am setting up for a client. Originally I was asked for something Eco and suggested a solar powered light. I investigated the lights and found out that those cheap £1 garden lights are not easy to make in schools, and certainly not cheaply. They are very highly mass produced and include components, such as the curiously named 'Joule Thief' that are not going to be easy to make with 12 year olds in a few hours! So I developed a simple light Jar using small cheap solar panels that charges up two AA batteries and turns on and off when you turn it upside down, but the total cost of all the bits still came to over £7 each! If I had wanted to buy a million kits they would probably have been £0.50- including the jar...
Also the teacher in charge didn't think her staff would have the skills to assemble the connector block based circuit and troubleshoot any problems.
So I went back to the sketchbook, simplified it again and still it looked too complicated for the time now available which had shrunk to around 2 hours!
So I started thinking about the project from the other end, not starting with the electronics.. The core skills were building something using hand skills, becoming used to manipulating simple electronic components and producing a circuit that would enhance a garden, and thus the Electric Lizard project was born. This one is made of 3.2mm aluminium wire, joined together with connector blocks and uses a 2 x AA switched battery box driving 2 x 3mm Rainbow LED's as eyes. Hung on a wall, the eyes illuminate the area around the head and slowly cycle through the colours of the rainbow. There is no need for any resistors or other components and a simple sleeve protects the led legs from short circuiting. I showed it to the teacher in charge and she was delighted, and now I have used some wonderful coloured wire from www.wires.co.uk to create a multicoloured version which will have 2 x AAA batteries, and the 2mm aluminium wire will be easy for little fingers to bend into shapes.
This original prototype in the photo has been passed around loads of students and they are very excited at the prospect of making them, which is a valuable asset in the classroom. It may not be the last word in electronics, but it is a positive learnng experience that is relatively cheap to make (£1.75) and will hopefully inspire the students to investigate electronics in more detail in the future

Cheap Resource or Overpriced Toy?

I once boasted, somewhat immodestly, that given a class and a ream of A4 paper, scissors and glue, I could run an event for a whole day... To my extreme happiness, nobody has yet asked me to prove this, but I think the principal is still sound, it is the teacher that is the best resource, adapting the resources to their need. This has been proved in reverse many times and evidenced by the store cupboards of robots and techno gear in most schools, bought for some wonderful project, often based on the skills of a particular teacher, then when it or the teacher proves unable to fulfill their promise, the resources are quietly squirrelled away. Too valuable to dump, too complicated to use, and eventually too old fashioned to be applicable, such resources wonderful convoluted surfaces prove excellent at gathering dust, and for a few teachers, guilt. Many science departments suffer the same ignominy with beautiful glass cased mahogany framed instruments which are wheeled out once a year to demonstrate Boyles law and refresh the happy memories of the senior departmental members.
I got bit by this bug about 8 years ago. RealRobots was one of those magazines where you collect a piece an issue to make the robot. It was actually very good, and at a time when robots were very expensive, it promised, in 40 parts, a real programmable robot with advanced features. Unfortunately about issue 30 it became clear, despite my careful research before I convinced the Deputy head to buy a THREE subscriptions, that everything was not quite rosy and we would have to extend the subscription a further 20 issues per robot (Total 60) to get the controller... and pay extra to get features that were trumpeted as standard at the start. I pulled the plug and had to admit to the Deputy Head that I had been wrong, worse the school had lost a few hundred pounds. RealRobots, it turned out, hadn't got a complete product when the series started and there was a great outcry from buyers wanting to know where their promised 40 part controllable robot had gone.
So resources are a minefield. You can keep a class of toddlers happy with a few trays and a packet of cornflour for hours, you can also use the same resources with a Technology class to talk about materials science, thixotropic materials, bullet proof vests, Sorbothane and 'D3' energy absorbing phone cases. It is the skill of the teacher that matters, and their research before the teaching session.
So a real puzzle was the low sales of my PopGlider corrugated card plane through www.ajbox.co.uk . Developing the plane as a set of resources, including 3 presentations, teachers guide, worksheets and demonstration films, I expected it to be taken up by many and used, as intended, as the focus for practical learning around Materials Science, Flight, Air Density, Quality of Construction and many other areas. It seems though that it gets used as a filler, something to quickly build and try out with a class, and therefore, at £1 a plane, relatively expensive. I thought that all those free resources would encourage people to use the PopGlider to its full potential, without the resources it is a dull sheet of card, however brilliant as a plane... Of course, being made out of 100% recycled card and 100% recyclable, I could always eat them!

Bug Development

Since getting a rather interesting clockwork bug a few years ago at a wonderful museum in Amsterdam, I have been looking at variations of it and developing ideas based around it.
most notably this has led to the Scuttlebug / Clockbug which looks like this and I have delivered as a project to over 500 students and their Teachers / TA's in the past three years.

But recently I have started experimenting with springy wire and other bits and I am now in the fourth idea and starting to fine tune the materials and make sure it is a bullet proof project.
This image was created in Sketchup... of course!


The first three versions were complete failures, hopefully this will be better...

Super Simple Activity = Complex learning opportunity

Yesterday I ran a one day event on flight with a small group of Engineeri Diploma Students.
The day focussed on building a simple paper / card plane to learn the basics, then using this knowledge to design, build and fly a balsa wood and clingfilm glider
I already have my own design of corrugated cardboard plane sold through www.kitronik.co.uk / The PopGlider, but I wanted something which wouldn't virtually gurantee a good flight with basic assembly, so I designed the Chunky Monkey (named after the Ben and Jerry's ice cream). It is a single sheet glider which can be photocopied onto standard 160gsm card, then assembled with a spot of glue and some sellotape, and weighted with a bit of plasticine. Carefully built it flies pretty well, not as well as PopGlider, but certainly good enough to demonstrate whether it was well built. The event yesterday emphasised the importance of Balance, Symmetry, Alignment and Quality of construction. Get it right and flights of 20 + metres are possible indoors.
So my rough and ready plane proved a better way to maximise the students experience precisely because something could go wrong if instructions were not followed, skills not learned, quality not maintained... A metaphor for life really!

Male Textiles

This idea is a simple magnetic closure textile project aimed at Male and Female students at KS3 (11-14 years). Spare headphone cable is wound round it and then it is attached to clothing to keep headphones close. I call the project SideWinder


I developed it from a project called 'lightband' for which there are free resources for on youtube and also at www.nelc.net under their 'not a desk tidy' directory of resources

Am supporting teachers trying this over the next couple of weeks with classes. It uses felt for the main material, two layers with a neodymium 10mm magnet and washer fixed between the layers. Simple, effective and capable of infinite variations by students and staff...

Quick Update - And getting what you need...

Long time since last post...
Since then have redeveloped catapult into an adjustable mini version, tried to find a porgrammer for geogebra, Produced a new Textile project aimed at including boys for KS3, and lots more that I will post about in the next few weeks.

But First.... Kettles.
Just bought ANOTHER kettle. Same as the last 5, a leak between joints, usually between plastic and metal elements, allows water and steam to escape, forming hard water limescale deposits which open up cracks even more until eventually it is too dangerous to be used! Back in the late 1980's, I bought a designer kettle and the shop owner told me they would never last as long as traditional ones, he said ' everyone wants water level gauges and such stuff but all these things create seams which fail much qucker than old one piece kettles'. Well he was right, while our choice of kettles has rocketed, The UK Argos website now lists over 120, reading the customer reviews even on their site reveals they all suffer from leaks, because the manufacturers have given us all the things we seem to want, water gauges, coloured lights, soft touch handles, concealed elements etc, but they still seem to break after a few years or less of use. This seems odd when I know people with old kettles lasting ten or more years, the answer seems to be that we buy on features, not longevity..in fact if we have to compromise the features to get a product that lasts longer, we don't want it. But Wait, the famously long lasting Dualit brand also sell a kettle for a not inconsiderable £80, but reading the customer reviews reveals that these also leak... In fact, ironically, the more your kettle costs, the more Argos will charge you (they call it breakdown insurance, I call it swindling) to replace it a few years later when it leaks, even though you presumably thought that by paying more you were gettting something more durable.
Just like in kettles, you can have projects with lots of bells and whistles, or a simple one with a good premise and quality outcomes. Keep it simple and keep it durable... Don't ornament just to make it look great, it may fail on you unexpectedly.