Ammonite Projects

Way back in the 1980's when it was fashionable for teachers to have big fuzzy hair do's rather than because they own overly powerful hair driers and under powered fashion senses, a new type of school project became available to mainstream schools. Suddenly 'Design' was the new buzzword and many schools, then educational organisations and (very) finally exam boards embraced this new ethic. The projects were revolutionary for the time! A puzzle frame, A box to hold things that were measured FIRST and a PROJECT FOLDER that considered the users needs rather than your dads. It greatly changed DT and with the IT revolution in schools, we got CAD and then EXPLORATION.

I write these words in capitals because they took over the imagination of teachers in their day. In the 1990's we then got innovation and design started to become less about the colour and style and more about the function. Bauhaus started to seem like a cool way of doing things. It was also the age of the quick project. Newspaper bridges, Eggs supported with sphaghetti high in the air, string transport systems. No longer was it neccesary to produce a total product, you could expore the world and find out stuff without needing to varnish it afterwards!

Unfortunately, many schools are stuck in this mode, even some educational organisations that should know better. I recently attended an event for teachers and academics to meet together which started with the 'build a bridge out of newspaper and sellotape' competition. I actually came second from bottom! This was because no'one measured how far apart the tables were we built from, no'one bothered that many were stuck firmly to the tables and that deflection was fine resulting in bridges that only 4x4's could have crawled uphill on. I was not impressed because despite a decade of trying to get teachers and organisations to think strategically and plan effective activities with rules and mark schemes, the person running this one hadn't even thought it through and there was little that made the task educationally applicable. All we really learned was that cheating won as by sticking ever larger amounts of rolled up paper together, eventually one could support an elephant, but not an educational learning experience.

Now budgets are down, teachers workloads are up and the goverment has delayed the implementation of educational reform http://bbc.in/s77zgL that will rot some departmest as schools decide to wait and see which subjects have traction in the new curriculum model. Why invest in training in a department where half the staff may leave in the next 5 years due to subject reduction. I think many schools are in for even more newspaper bridges run without thought, eggs supported without planning or considered outcome, more ideas left behind because investing is diffciult when you dont know what you are investing in..

These dusty bridges and ascending eggs are ammonite projects. Fossilised and slowly becoming tokens of a wider culture rather than a gateway to new learning opportunities. Most museums sell ammonites attached to keyrings, something to remind you as you get on with the real work. Will these ill prepared and ill defined dinosaurs condemn you and your department to a dusty drawer? Change them! Do something new! Lest the chill wind of change dessicates your very creative bones...

Finally I have got the wrinkles out of a set of 8 new free projects for DT and STEM teachers.

www.nelc.net (Nottingham e-Learning Centre) have commissioned me over the past 24 months to write a set of 8 different projects. These are totally new to education and all have Teachers notes, presentations, worksheets and loads of specialist files. many also have e-Learning films, Sketchup models and one has Circuit Wizard files

They are all on a dedicated website I have written at www.notadesktidy.org (Remember the www bit at the front, its essential)

There are Vacuum Bazookas, Chicken Shaped Catapults and Quantum Tunelling Compound Operated Bracelets to name just a few of the 8 separate projects for free download there

Please tell everybody!

Boiling it down STEM and education

Here in the UK there has been an unprecedented shrinkage of the education ' market' for goods and services in the last 18 months. Large numbers of companies have folded or drastically reduced. Many training establishments have laid off staff to the point where some buildings are mostly empty for most of the time because there are few calls for their services now. For those who choose to look, there is evidence of a generation of consultants, advisors and content developers retiring. This is unsurprising given many have already been teachers, HOF and then staff at an educationally linked company for many decades. This is starting to affect the abilities of teachers to take on new projects. Often stripped of funds to attend outside training courses, and with the now unsubsidised training agencies asking for full fees, the market for their services is slowing and likely to stagnate further from April 2012.

Does this mean I am packing it all in? Not at all! I saw the changes in the

market some time ago and have been working towards a different consultancy model, one in tune with the growing STEM agenda in schools.

Last week I launched www.stemday.co.uk , a site packed full of new educational projects I have developed that you can buy in class sets of 25.

All the support files, presentations, worksheets etc, teachers notes and learning films are free to buyers.

At a time when teachers cannot get out of the classroom for training, StemDay projects come to you. You can hire my modestly priced and extensively recommended services by the day (£350 + VAT + travel), or you can buy all that concentrated educational goodness in a highly professional package by purchasing kits and downloading the extensive FREE delivery and training resources. For example, a set of 25 GraviCars, powered by a bottle of water, costs just £135 + VAT, including delivery to anywhere on mainland UK.

StemDay project resources make a great INSET activity, guiding you stage by stage through building, tuning and testing the practical activity. Obviously they are also a fantastic focus for faculties working together to deliver STEM

So whether you're new to STEM, looking to run further STEM projects or want to try something new that will transform your teaching, try my kits!

And now for something completely different

I have been working at various technologies over the summer holiday:

For the casually interested, I've been experimenting with Garageband on the iPad for Educational use. I know that some teachers look down on the iPad version of Garageband because of its limited (At the moment read non-existent) ability to input and output samples. I suspect that the upcoming iCloud (Oct in UK) will go some way to sorting that out. I know that on the iPad it is a sublime, simple and relatively easy to understand DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). I suppose the more you use it the more you notice whats missing, but for the price of an iPad, and the base version will work fine (£399) you get a complete recording studio complicated enough for most casual users/ bands, plus a state of the art fondleslab as touch screen tablets are becoming geekily known as. A standard guitar interface such as the Griffin brand one works extremely well and there are a couple of companies producing serious studio quality microphone interfaces with mics for under £100 which will surpass the quality of any cheap Zoom or Tascam hand help recorder mic.

For the keen technologist, I have finished translating a 3D shark model (3DS) into a 1 long metre set of 63 vertical slices to create a hanging model for a client that requested it. Not easy, not fast but if they can assemble it.. should be a great advert for their faculty and inspiration for the next cohort learning CadCam. It was one of those projects that was far easier to state the problem than produce the solution!

For the seriously Geeky, I am working on a PCB for a new educational Electronics Project using an 8 pin PICGenie to drive an RGB LED as a wall washer through sequential programming of Pulse Width Modulation commands using variables to cycle through a (relatively random) set of colours at the push of the switch and experimenting with reflective tube mixers (Rolls of aluminium foil) to dissipate the three focussed beams to produce a steady hue. It uses a cars convex stick on side mirror to direct the light but at the moment I am still fiddling with protoypes and 'generic verses Piranha' brand LED's. What fun...

Here is a video of the prototype wall washer. There is also a PCB layout but as I am still making changes to the prototype, that is on hold. The main thing to notice here is the ease of use. A few resistors and a 3.5mm stereo socket make the programming interface, and a few led's make the output. The special programming leads are £12 but the basic Genie programming software which is a very slick and incredibly well supported design, is FREE. If you want access to advanced features and to design your PCB and see the effect on the PIC live, you need the full fat version of Circuit Wizard (NOT the one sold in Maplins, its missing PIC bits) , but for a total outlay of around £70 you could buy three cables and enough protoblocks and parts to keep a small electronics class happy all year!

Ripe Technology

11 years ago I saw a demo by a senior lecturer at a UK university of Augmented Reality. Someone moved in front of a camera and the image was overlayed with a simple face mask. Amazing though it was, it took a whole university department to create and a fair few of them to keep it working.

Last week I ran an augmented reality 1950's inspired Retro toaster designing event. For 12 students in Leicestershire I delivered the event through Google Sketchup (STILL my 3d design program of choice) and through studying aspects of 1950's product design. Students used this knowledge to design their own toaster around a 3d model of a mechanism I had previously created for them.

At the end of the day all the students were able to view their model by holding up a printed sheet to a webcam, turning the paper to make the model appear to be turning in their hands. Even more remarkably, it has been possible to create a stand alone file (a few clicks within Sketchup) that students emailed to their friends which when run, just needs the printed out 'marker' design held up to a camera for their friends to view it as well.

The 11 years this has taken between a technology demonstration and now is a good example of how the best Technology is not necessarily the cutting edge stuff, but that which has matured. I am confident now that I can teach staff to run their own Augmented reality events, integrate it into the curriculum and ensure that EVERYONE in a class of 32 students can do their own. At the point where everyone can participate, then the technology is truly, IMHO, ready for schools. ANYONE can show a demo, but it takes time and careful selection of equipment, software and project to ensure that EVERYONE actually does something educationally worthwhile with it.

Last week I did the mask thing. I knocked up a quick GoatBird mask in Sketchup then invited students to stick the 'marker' to their heads. A rather awkward student normally instantly changed and danced in front of the camera, wearing this non-existent but very real mask.

Today I took delivery of a PICO Projector, a tiny battery operated LED projector which I am experimenting with for taking augmented reality on to the next level. Again the PICO projectors have been available for a few years, but now I believe the technology is now mature, and like all things mature, ripe for use

Thousands of Pounds

Sometimes a cheap idea works just as well as an expensive one. This idea needs 20 sheets of A4 paper, a ping pong ball and some drawing pins.

These students had a limited time to build something that would slow the ball down as it moved from the top of the 'wall' to the bottom. This design took 6 seconds for a ping pong ball to travel through it. I reckon times in excess of 30 seconds should be achievable with just paper tubes fixed at shallow angles.

The tubes are pieces of paper rolled and pins used to hold the overlapping edges together and pin these through to the pinboard backing

I have suggested to a primary school they build a giant version covering a whole wall, with ramps and tubes, hoppers and swivelling parts, all from thin card and paper with maybe a few swivelling self adhesive bits

Augment Reality Toasters and Budget Catapults

My next project is going to be a 1950's inspired Toaster design 3D Graphics 1 day student event incorporating augmented reality for displaying the final designs.

It is going to be mega... and I will post details of it as it develops.

In the meantime, here is a 4 metre release height catapult you can build for £30 that throws a can of coke 60 metres easily. I designed and built these for a client to run a Science event on forces. Here is the catapult in use throwing a cricket ball (All the coke exploded after one throw!) about 45 metres easily. Unfortunately the moving speck which was the cricket ball doesn't show up well in the uploaded version but it reached half way up the bank at the end of the field they are on.

180mph in a 30 zone

I am typing this on my new laptop. A Dell XPS 15. In fact you will have to move fast if you want one because this model will be unavailable in about a month as this is the OLD model. The SLOW model with the OUTDATED graphics and LOW amounts of memory that I have just spent good money on.

In real life use though, it is absolutely fine. I typically run 7 graphically intensive programs simultaneously using the laptop to power 2 x full HD monitors and it rarely slows down. I COULD have bought something three times as fast for twice the money (This XPS cost me £440 shipped and inc VAT, after 11 hectoring calls from Dells call centres over 48 hours to negotiate the price down bit by bit.... they are advertising the identical same computer right now for £580 online!)

But this is not a brag, just pointing out that 10 years ago my computer cost £1650, 6 years ago my first laptop cost me £1540, 2.5 years ago the old laptop cost £700. My next laptop after this one... may not be a traditional laptop at all, and that's because No-One I personally know, needs the power of the modern laptops typically selling now for £800+. Its like owning a Ferrari in a country with a blanket 30mph speed limit.

In the next month, Google will launch, partnered with various laptop manufacturers, Chrome OS Laptops. This will be a game changer for education. The OS stands for operating system. These are not Mac or windows computers, they are their own separate, standalone computing platform.

Chrome OS laptops don't store any user data on them, and typically they have installed only the very basic office software. Everything is stored, and increasingly computed, on the Internet. If you want to edit photos, you will use an online editing program to do this. Printing will be via wifi of any document you have. Though this sounds fabulous, there are a couple of caveats... First you need to have a permanent reliable fast internet connection otherwise all you have is a doorstop. Secondly the range of programs and their power is limited so though 95% of tasks students and staff do in schools could be handled by Chrome OS laptops, you will still (As will I) need some traditional computers for CAD, Music, Video Editing etc.

So why should schools consider Chrome OS laptops in the future (Not now, give them a year to iron the bugs out and bring out some killer applications, like the iPad took to get really useful)? Because of cost savings. No heavy infrastructures, no huge servers, no hyper expensive network fixers. Probably no viruses. Also any student and teacher can use any Chrome laptop and it configures, when they log in, to their security level and chosen settings. Finally, they are going to be very cheap... Probably £200 in 2 years time... Because they are just a screen, an internet connection and a very big and rapidly strengthening idea.

The traditional ICT system that supplies schools is going to fight this very hard. The basis of their business model is that you HAVE to get the latest software, update, hardware, system management utility otherwise all that nasty spyware will kill your school, but I have started to wonder whether all the mega computing power schools wield is actually there to keep these behomoth systems working. A new version of windows needs a new bigger browser so a new bigger network system so a bigger server, but look hard at what 95% of your students actually do.... Most of it is writing reports, making basic spreadsheets and producing presentations. I know Microsoft charge very little for Office to schools, but that is because you use very little of it apart from the basic tools that Office had 20 years ago (Go Look at Word 6.0 for Windows 3.1 if you don't believe me. It ran slow, but it had similar functionality for students needs to Office 2010)

And why do I think this will happen? Because of the iPad. It showed me that most things we USE a computer for now are basic, already internet based and don't need a massive infrastructure to work.

Chrome OS.... Keep an eye out for it!

Who owns your project?

Cloud computing is the latest buzzword for using online programs and storage to carry out tasks. If you have ever uploaded a photo to a website, tweaked the look and size and saved it in your user account, then you have done cloud computing. Increasingly schools are using such online tools and storage, sometimes without realising thats what they are doing.

The vast majority of these tools are free, and when you have the chances to offload your storage and get access to some seriously cool computing tricks, it becomes very compelling to schools with increasingly tight budgets... But are you actually in charge?

There have been a number of music services online which shut down when they went bust or failed to make money for their owners. Annoyingly for people who bought music through them, some lost the lot and then found out in the terms and conditions that they had merely been renting the music and there was no legal imperative for the service to be available forever. Others have used online tools to edit photos, then found the website closed, bit of a problem when all their schemes of work use it. Even worse, students saved work would also disappear.

Even more interesting is where your data is stored. Increasingly companies use secure data centres, either huge air conditioned buildings with rack upon rack of servers, or natural caves tricked out like a James Bond set. They may even not be in this country, possibly not even on the same continent. Where the data is unlikely to be, in the event of a power / data cut at your school, is somewhere in your building!

Cloud computing and storage is an inevitability, but maybe we need to look beyond the headline claims by companies offering us this cool option and consider where and how our data is stored. Schools who would not allow a laptop home with sensitive student data on it seem fine with having that data 'anonymously' located somewhere they have no physical access

Remember - A USB stick in the hand is worth far more, during a crisis, than a thousand in a climate controlled data centre a thousand miles away!

And before you think that is the only thing to worry about, read this!

http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/75-year-old-woman-cuts-off-internet-to-georgia-and-armenia-2011047/

for 12 hours, 90% of users in an entire country had no internet access because a pensioner stole the cable. Keep your friends close, and your data closer still... or at least the copies!

Look through your window

Recently I visited a school while it was closed. Many UK schools now share facilities such as sports halls and pitches with the public. This school was one of these. Every week thousands of people walk past the huge windows common to all schools and can see whats going on. A friend was with me and wondered why I was earnestly peering through the windows, the school was shut, , then when he came to look as well he exclaimed... It looks just like my old woodwork room!

I like to think that I can decipher the room a bit more professionally and from the three rooms I could see into, there was almost no ICT or evidence of it visible. Instead the rooms displayed the top three indicators that someone somewhere had given up inspiring students, and instead settled,(Probably not without a fight) for processing them instead.

If you have at least two of these in your room, is it time to change?

1: The immaculate project pages covering a whole wall by a student from at least 3 years ago which sets an impossibly high standard for all the others, and inevitably involved them spending many many times the allotted hours on their coursework, just to achieve that last 10% of marks. Why we parade these 'perfect' projects I do not know, they set an impossibly high bar for the average student and emphasise the prettiness of work over its function to inform. A decade ago an exam board told me that fancy borders gained no marks anymore, yet the person they sent round to assess some students work that year in a school I visited, waxed lyrically over a similar project by a student, condemning another years cohort to hours of wasteful decoration on an already tight timetable.

2: The poster which came with Blueprint or another technology magazine, usually showing a cutting edge or classic piece of design. Blutak'd to a wall, it is pointed to for inspiration but forms no coherent part of a display, has no further explanation and usually no student inspired work branching from it. Favourites are the Charles Eames Lounger or classic chairs, The London Underground Map and cutaways of the 'new' Mini. Hanging forlornly they're yellowing edges communicate much more than their intended message. Dyson posters, a product of extreme levels of design, prototyping and state of the art manufacture utterly unavailable in schools, are becoming a new category of these iconic wall hangings

3: A selection of badly made, poorly designed projects which needed a bit more effort and thought but have become part of the carousel of experience. Nowadays this is often a token electronics project, represented by two pieces of hardboard screwed at right angles to each other with a 'steady hand game' hot glued to it, behind a hand written background

Some will find this post depressing, thinking that I am unaware of the lot of teachers, the tests and timetables and issues involved in modern teaching seem to become more onerous every year, but think about why you went into teaching! Perhaps tidying those books, refreshing those posters, changing those projects a little could change your attitude and working environment as much as your students... and would that be a bad thing?

WebSite Update

The www.ajbooker.co.uk website will be taken down in the next two weeks but the majority of application files will be placed in a directory online for people to download the files as they see fit.

This means all the 2D Designer DTD files, JPG photos, .PCB Circuit Wizard files etc will be still be available but you will have to sort through them carefully

I think it is timely to remind people that most of the files getting the heaviest access, such as revision cards for electronics and info on cardboard displays, were for specific examination specifications and should be carefully checked before you let them loose on your students. Most of the files on the site are not specific to a particular exam, but I have been surprised in previous years at the hundreds of views per hour of files for a subject, such as Graphics, hours or days before the examination paper was set. More on this another time...

Going Going Gone

This post is to inform all my readers that the present www.ajbooker.co.uk website will be changed around Easter 2011 and it is highly likely that the vast majority of free files in the RESOURCES section will then be permanently unavailable

The website started about 2004 when I was still a teacher. I wrote it, mostly between 11pm and 1 in the morning) when schools systems couldn't cope with too many staff files, as a repository of teaching files and an advice centre for my students. It actually started as an electronics website which is still buried deep inside the main site. Over the years it grew and grew and I think it now has about 500+ pages, created on a computer I owned at the time using Dreamweaver. At its peak it had about 2 million hits a year, probably far more as many of these were local caching by schools from around the world

Now the website is so complex to change and time consuming to do so that I have decided to ditch it and start with something more focussed on my present consultancy work, without the myriad extra sites and hundreds of photo pages and images. Please feel free to download as much as possible before then, and if anybody wishes to host the core educational files within their own website, with a suitable link back to my new site, then please email me to discuss what and how

In its place will be a list of hopefully all the projects I have done as a consultant, along with links to sites I have created for clients and my own download areas for a small set of exemplar files

Given the traffic to the site over the years, it is ironic that I never got more than a handful of thank you's from school staff per year, especially as it was clear just before exam time in the uk that hundreds of users per hour were accessing the relevant pages...

I have been on the Internet since we called it Cyberspace (About 1996) and it still seems to me that quality content is what people want, unfortunately just after they have tweeted their dinner menu and updated their facebook status

So please feel free to graze the shoals of data there, but soon I will dynamite the reef!

Image Quality

Every so often there is a game changing bit of software for education. Usually it is the result of a market maturing, Education gets the benefit some years after the technology is used in industry and usually by then the wrinkles have been ironed out. We can see this benefit to education in the plethora of PIC electronic systems, all based on pretty much the same programming kernel and chip (whatever some may argue) and offering near identical levels of performance. Sketchup has been my choice for the last five years whenever a new idea pops in my head and I wish to model it, but the flaw has been the possibility of outputting truly stunning images to compete with the industry best. Certainly Pro Desktops b

uilt in renderer is far better than the different type of image presentation that Sketchup can produce and many teachers have told me they would miss that functionality.

Now there is a new way to output your images created in Sketchup, through a product called Shaderlight. This, like all truly useful education programs, needs as little as one button push from within your Sketchup window to produce a high quality rendered image. For those new to rendering, it basically plots the path of light which reaches every pixel in an image so if a surface is transparent and shiny, the light reaching it wi

ll be affected by what goes through it, illuminates it and reflects off it. There are other renderers out there which many schools use effectively for higher level work, but they take a fair bit of intuition and experimentation to use. To date, Shaderlight seems to be the only one which gets it right with basic functionality that works with that elusive 'one button'. For the more tecchie, yes it supports bump map type functions, comes with built in light models and you can tweak some parameters, but for you running a class of 30 students who need simple results, it can be a single button press! For those new to rendering, expect to twiddle your thumbs a lot. A simple model at 640 x 480 pixels takes about 30 seconds and

as you add more details and lighting and increase the image size, it can run to many minutes, but it runs in the background while you get on with something else.

The sample model here is shown as a Sketchup screen capture, and also as a 1024 x 768 rendered image in Shaderlight. I have spent a couple of minutes optimising the image in shaderlight menu, but not much. This is one of the first 3d models in Sketchup I ever produced. I never thought it would ever look this good without redrawing in a different and sriously more expensive and complicated package...

Gravicar develops

Have now built a Gravicar, and several things have needed changing. The width didn't quite give enough room for the wheels to fix. If you were careful they worked well, but any slight difference in building and they fell off! So now the whole thing is 10mm narrower as well as having extra marks on the cardboard sheets of joiners to show which way is up when assembling the three main frames.
The 10Th of February is a big day because I am running a whole day event for 150 students in 6 classrooms, simultaneously building them as part of a STEM day I am running at a clients. This means getting all parts ordered and in stock, card pieces laser cut, info and building sheets copied and staff briefed. As with all my projects, I am going to base the building around a PowerPoint using Sketchup graphics and photos to show the stages. Backed up with a Students building sheet to build 'ON' and a diary sheet to record 'ABOUT' the day, that should be enough to keep them all going.
The one featured here rolls about 5 metres using the 500ml bottle of water. Replacing the wide wheels with CD's would give a very low rolling resistance and with string that unwound completely from the axle, should travel about 30 metres on a good flat floor indoors.
I am going to use very slight ramps to start it off as some built will be a bit 'sticky' with too much friction. Probably a sheet of polypropylene about 50mm high
This is not a new project, but I hope I have streamlined it enough that all the students can build it without too many problems, and that the non-specialist staff can assist them

Mass manufacture:
A present client of mine wants to run a STEM event (Science Technology Engineering and Maths based) event for up to 140 students at the same time for a whole day. I have done a number of these events, developing ideas and training staff and often leading the day. The clients has a technician to cut parts and order specialist materials but not for this particular event. Originally this gravity powered car was to be made from sheet material, or using special huge cardboard pieces I had previously developed. To fit in with the time availabel to make the parts and source the other pieces, I designed this version below.
This version uses bought in 600mm wooden spars. These are joined first into three basic frames using an A4 sheet of laser cut cardboard pieces which also join the three frames into the final shape. Each laser cut piece is pre drilled with holes for the drawing pins which hold the pieces together while they glue and provide additional support while it is used. All other pieces are off the shelf components available from at least 3 major educational suppliers to minimise supply difficulties. With this design, and a bottle of water each, the students will all have a great learning experience competing in various activities

Chicken Catapullet

This is a project for my client, Nottingham e-Learning Centres, devised as a set of files and exemplars to show just how creative you can be with a simple idea.
A laser cutter sales company was selling a simple ping pong ball catapult project and I was intrigued by this as not only was it cut out of 3mm acrylic, it also worked only moderately. With the support of www.nelc.net, I designed a new catapult from scratch as a set of simple elements that could be personalised and adapted. From this came the CataPullet, a chicken shaped catapult.
The design was developed in CAD (2D Design) then parts checked for size in Sketchup, then a first cardboard prototype cut on the SELC laser. Then this version in green acrylic. I was delighted that the worm shaped ratchet/trigger worked first time as it was the most difficult part of the design.
There are now 6 projects for FREE download at http://www.wix.com/nottinghamelc/notadesktidy (Flash only I am afraid) where teachers notes, exemplar files and video of me demonstrating the projects can be viewed.

I am always available to develop new projects for clients. This one was to drive visitors to their pages, something special that can also work in the classroom day to day!
Let me know if you want something for your organisation or company