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