Write about reality...

A slight diversion from my normal subject here...at first anyway!
This week a new game called FarCry3 was launched.  Being a keen game player of open world games where you can run around pretty much anywhere and choose your actions, I was looking forward to it and I happily read the first reviews that popped up online.  After reading a couple I had a disquieting feeling that the reviewers hadn't actually played the game, at least not as customers would.  Normally reviews mention the controls, the quality of graphics, differences between the game running on different game consoles but nope, nothing about that.  My guess is that these reviews were rushed out based on video's of gameplay, perfect experiences if you like that the game company gave to the reviewers.

Now lets switch to a completely different subject, Academies.  I work for some Academies, I know a fair bit about them and early ones seemed a genuine attempt to quickly raise standards by stripping away the past and giving genuine freedom to innovate, but now, like the reviews of the game, I am not so sure I am seeing the true experience when I read about them.  Academies are being created where a school might have failed, with almost the same management, teachers and students, no real extra funding and no big building project or equipment to inspire. Schools are being given  a new lease of life but under the watchful eye of Mr Gove.  The stories about academies in the media seem to assume they will automatically be successful because they are academies, but emerging academic research, which takes time to assess and publish its findings unlike spin doctors, is starting to question if that is the case.

So on one hand we have a game where everyone is writing about it, but there is little detail about the end user experience and it seems that the people posting positive comments are basing it on ideal circumstances.  On the other hand we have Academies.  I for one am grateful the type of shenanigans we see in the games industry are not replicated in experiments on the education of today's young people...

The journey to produce a good educational resource

Sometimes my Consultancy work needs takes a lot of thought to translate it into a form suitable for schools.

A client saw this YouTube video of Pythagoras theory demonstrated using liquid and asked if I could make a version for them

Seemed simple enough.  The client has a laser cutter and something we could reproduce would be best so after making a test one they could knock them out cheaply, one per classroom or even learning table.

I suggested we use 25mm and 50mm polystyrene balls in flat trays so you could demonstrate the theory with two sizes

but the client said they preferred something that flowed so I went back to trying to replicate what is in the video

I started by trying to work out certain basics like;

1: how does it work?  Well the liquid runs out of two holes at the corner of the big square linking to the smaller squares.  This is disguised by that big stick on yellow triangle so you cant see the holes which have to be big enough for the liquid to drain fairly quickly under gravity

2:  What's the liquid?  Well I guessed it was distilled water with an added chemical to stop it going off (I have seen similar tricks used in tabletop water features) and some blue dye

3:  How do you keep the liquid in?  That's when it got tricky.  What you see here is a demo, not something you put in a classroom and expect to get knocked about in a storage cupboard.  Plus there's got to be at least a kilo of water sloshing around in there so you have some forces to contend with.  My best guess is that it is made from 10 mm acrylic, cut with a laser cutter and then joined by capillary action using a Tensol type cement, run into the gaps using a metal needle and a syringe.  The bolts we can see hold it on the backboard that rotates, and spreads the load of the water so it doesn't strain the corners and cause leaks.  there are similar ones in science museums but they are also fitted to a static board so can't be pulled around too much by users

4:  How do you get the liquid in?  Again its a guess but I reckon its from a small plug under that yellow triangle accessed from the back

5:  Can I make one like this?  No.  At least not with the time and materials budget I have available. I could make one that would last a month or so but rough handling would quickly cause leaks.  I could seal all the edges with 1mm neoprene sheet, sandwiched between the acrylic layers but experience tells me this would still leak eventually as water is 'sneaky' stuff

So I started looking for an alternative way and started with what I could replace the liquid with. Sand seems ideal but must not scratch the inside of the surfaces.  Playground sand uses more rounded grains than the standard building 'sharp' sand so would be a reasonable choice but would probably still scratch a little.  I also looked at Millefiore glass beads used in enamelling but these are pricey for the amount needed, and too big at 2 mm.  I then looked at seeds, most will fall apart or crush when in use, meaning there wouldn't be enough to fill the spaces after a while but Black onion seeds (Nigella) looked promising till I checked on Wikipedia and discovered they are poisonous if eaten in large quantities!

I then looked at sand alternatives and considered salt, too likely to powder down, and Hama beads, too big as they are 5mm and the gap between the acrylic sheets is going to be 5mm.  You can buy 2mm beads in bulk but any slight irregularity and they wouldn't fill the spaces effectively.  Could increase the gap to 10mm with two layers but that would need an economically unviable amount of 2mm beads. I briefly researched magic sand whose hydrophobic coating would prevent sticking together under moisture, then discovered they stick together MORE when damp than normal sand!

After a while I thought about shot blasting and quickly discovered that glass beads for shot blasting is a safe, inert and CHEAP material. Given the amount of handling these will get, I do not think there will be a problem with the glass powdering as these beads are specifically made to be reused over and over as , impacting on hard surfaces. If stored in a slightly damp cupboard it shouldn't stick together and should  be suitable for smaller versions of the Pythagoras model as well

So now I have the design drawn out in CAD, three layers of 5mm acrylic, laser cut, bolted together with M3 pancake flat head bolts and secured with washers and Nylock M3 nuts so students cannot easily open it.
A special section of the centre layer will be removable by undoing a fixing bolt to allow for filling and is cut a little bit bigger to take account of the laser beam width.  There are two flats on the circular rim so it can be stood up while filling.

NEXT - Make one! more details later

Under our fingertips

Do you have enough tools?  Do you possess enough software packages?  Do you own or rent the ability to make something?  Chances are you probably do.  With the average computer containing word processing software able to write, append, index and paginate a book, and spreadsheet software able to calculate enormous ideas, you could do anything, but do you?

Computers have allowed us access to tools that were fantasy a few decades ago.  I am now wondering if we have too much, if getting the tools is more important than mastering them.  I need to learn a new vector graphics package and when I checked, I already had 3 good ones but wasn't sure which to concentrate on from now on in.  I still remember the first one I truly mastered, Acorn Draw.  It seemed to only have about 11 tools, but I did wonders with it.  Images were laboriously built up from sub bits and the whole grouped together.  True it was a nightmare to edit parts later but with so few tools you could concentrate on being creative.

On my iPad I tend to use 'Paper 53' which is stripped down to 6 tools, 8 colours but a blindingly fast interface which doesn't slow my thinking down.  I actually have all the major vector graphics packages for the iPad but long ago gave up trying to interpret their quirks and inconsistencies. I no longer carry a paper pad, just my iPad and the 'Paper 53' software.  In a technical sense such simplification could be seen as going backwards, but because I am getting meaningful things down quickly and joyously.. I feel like I'm moving forward!

The UK has education today in the spotlight.  Government has announced a 'new' approach to exams it wants to introduce and the headlines talk of a future where exams at the end of a course are the only way to judge a students learning rather than modular examinations and coursework.

I failed A'level Geography many years ago.  I knew my stuff, and when my favourite topics came up in the paper in front of me, volcanoes and solifluction, I was extremely confident in answering the single exam that summed up the 500 days I had been studying for this subject.  I flopped and I do not know why to this day.  It might have been a lost paper or an accounting error or more likely I failed to read the question properly but I had been predicted a 'B'.  Does one death or glory moment adequately summarise a persons abilities?

I also failed the '11 plus' and was not picked for the local technical school.  Something deeply ironic there I think!

My favourite author, William Gibson, said (And I am massively simplifying here) that a young person in a poor area of south america could become a reasonable expert on classic mechanical watches within a year by studying in his own time using the Internet despite never handling or building a watch like it.  I think his implication is that the knowledge we defined in the past as demonstrating a high level of ability is now easily disseminated through the Internet and thus I suggest that learning requires different approaches.

Memory was a key element in proving intelligence in the past as well, but one which tended to favour the more 'academically gifted.  I know people in occupations where a prodigious memory is an absolute necessity and it is no coincidence that these are also subjects seen as among the highest callings by universities, those the government claims are amongst many crying out for these fundamental examination changes.

I advise on Technology, an area where a good memory is also essential but I value how that learned information is used more.  By the time a teacher tells a child what pewter is made of, the child can look up the fact and get an idea of what it can be used for and view 100 images of pewter objects.  It is how we use information, the fine detail, the experimentation, that is where future learning should be. Maybe we need to drop the requirement to find out basic stuff like what pewter is made of, and switch the whole of education to what we do with such information.  I will watch the present education debate with some interest... if I remember!

More Augmented Reality!
Am working on a proposal to put 10 famous engineering achievements into schools full size or at least enormous.  Following the success of working with an Academy to turn students Olympic ideas into 4 metre high 3D mascots

(Here are the students drawing and the final model displayed full size, as you walk round the model it correctly scales and alters the view so it appears to be really there, 4 metres high)

Students winning drawing

Augmented Reality model viewed through iPod

I have adapted the technology to show examples such as Stephenson's Rocket in a school hall or playground.  I am experimenting with adding info panels, transparent text panels that pop into view as you walk round or rotate the model so students can get more than just a 3D image.

This is displayed half size

As well as this I am working on other projects including these:

• Using an 8 pin PIC as a drum trigger to enable a folding amplified  'box' drum to be created
• Developing a super low cost self propelled cable car kit
• Developing a torsion rod powered vehicle
• Setting up an inter school online competition around 1 hour practical tasks

Olympic resources

The picture shows an Alfa Romeo on my drive at home. It was created by placing a picture, called a 'marker' on the ground and viewing it through an iPad. Clever free software running on the iPad overlays the view from the camera with the 3D model of the car. The software measures the size, perspective and orientation of the marker and uses this to display the 3D model correctly. This means you can walk round the model, and it appears to be 'there' in place.

 This technology is called Augmented Reality and is now mature enough to pass the 9C3 test (see previous post) and work. There are many Augmented reality systems (AR systems) and I am using one which works with any Sketchup model. This has enabled me to propose an Olympic project to a client. The students would design their own Olympic mascots on paper, judging the best one. The winner will be turned into a 3D Sketchup model and a free AR file. Students can then print out a marker for free and stick it anywhere, then view the 3D model through their Apple devices, Mac and Windows computers. This turns a flat paper drawing into a model that blends into real world.

 The real trick is printing the marker 2 metres across and sticking it on a wall.. Then the mascot displays 4M high and can be walked round and rotated with a finger on the screen. But is this technology worth while? This is the question from a colleague I got yesterday.

 In my opinion the problem with all new, previously unseen technology is that we can think so easily of so many ways to misuse it. Take a hammer, give it to a monkey, do you get work? Progress? Or just lots of crushed nuts. A tool is a tool because it s guided by us, mastering it, and as technology does increasingly amazing things, being amazed can become our only reaction. This brings us to Gold silver and Bronze. Most technologies evolve from simpler things, but technologies like AR appear seemingly from nowhere to the average computer user.

When mobile phones first came out, they were huge (I designed a system to display one that was the size and weight of three telephone directories, ) but as the cost fell and the features built up we gradually got used to it and that's why people have pretty well thought about opinions about whether pupils mobile phones should be allowed in schools, they understand the context, they roughly know the advantages and disadvantages, and they are familiar with the technology.  AR and other utterly new technologies are more difficult to see the benefit of because what first springs to mind is fooling around, showing off, testing the limits.  For every Gold medal winning idea that has great educational worth, there are a few silver ones that need careful explaining, and hundreds of bronze ones that though appealing, lack rigour. My job as a consultant is to mine for Gold ideas!

The dreaded 9C3 test...

As part of my consultancy work I am looking ahead all the time. I always have kits and bits and pieces around that are touted as 'the next big thing' but when examined its clear that for school educational use, its not quite ready. To decide this for myself I use my now infamous 9C3 test which assesses whether a new idea / object / process would be safe with 9C3 (14 year olds) after lunch on a snowy afternoon after a fight in the playground. If its robust enough, easy enough or plain educational enough then its time to think about implementing it in an average classroom. Usually the manufacturers have 'proved' some things educational worth with a lovely school where you would have to pump mercury vapour into the classroom for months to appreciably affect the amazingly high exam grades already present. I prefer to tel you its ready for the mainstream when it IS...

3D Printing didn't, until now, pass my 9C3 test. It was too expensive, too slow and too complicated. Now the latest generation of 3D printers are here, do not look like the set of a Mad Max movie and you shouldn't have to shout 'ill just adjust that' every ten minutes to disproving governors watching a dysfunctional demonstration.

This:

has been 3D printed
using this:

I have seen films of it working and I have one of the ballraces above in my hand right now. It weighs about 30g including support scaffolding so uses £1.03 of plastic (67c US) which can be bought in 1KG reels for about £35 and comes in the same stuff lego bricks are made of (Tough, very tough!) or a biodegradeable starch based polymer (price unknown) which the company is going to begin stocking in a few weeks time. I have seen a real time video and it only takes just over an hour to make, then weed (remove) the 'scaffold' (Bits that hold it all in place while being printed) off to leave the working bearing. Now its not really functional as a heavy duty 60mm diameter bearing (about the diameter of a coke can) because the surface texture is a little rough. Akin to medium glasspaper but very hard. The machine prints from standard STL files and the accompanying software has a reasonable built in utility that works out where the support needs to be for thin bits etc automatically. You can output an STL file form pretty much any 3D printer including Sketchup, but you'll need to use a third party plug in for the free version of Sketchup.

So there you are, I recommend this printer because it may need a bit of minor technician help to keep it going, but its robust, easy to understand, cheap and relatively fast. It will make something up to 140mm cube and costs about £1250 + VAT. It takes about 30 minutes to set up and start printing out of the box. And the best bit? It works NOW and you can buy it NOW! I found out about it at coolcomponents and thank you to them for letting me use their photos!

I queued all night for this education!

Recently the latest Apple iPad was launched. I own an iPAD2 but have sort of given it up for Lent. Something that was disarmingly easy which makes my decision to spend £500 on it in the first place as an 'essential purchase' questionable. Clients and friends have asked me if I am going to upgrade but at present, no. There is little new and my eyesight means I am unlikely to benefit form a display with no discernible pixels.

What I did notice is the queues to buy the new iPad. It seems now that we can judge how much people value something by how long they are willing to queue. In the UK education is still a right, but imagine instead you had to queue for 3 days without moving from the spot to get a university place, or a college course, or even into school itself... How would that change peoples perceptions of educations worth? An education, valued and nurtured, will buy you a whole lifetime of iPad s...

Rules! what rules? Oh-Those Rules..

In a famous science fiction story a man from 1950's in America, is transported back to 16th century Norway. He barters for his life by offering great technological wonders to the King, but everything he tries they either don't have a use for or he realises he doesn't have a clue exactly how something is done. He knows that iron ore makes steel, but how and how much and where do you get it from and how do you transport it? He knows about gears but not enough to get them working. The Norwegians and their King laugh at him because to them he is clearly an idiot telling fairy stories.

Modern manufacturing is a bit like that, I know HOW an iPad works but could not build one because while most modern products are created with processes that are explainable to most people in our science and technology focussed age, they rely on experts in different fields pooling their knowledge to actually make a specific part. A car is a great example of this because it is so multidisciplinary. The other obvious point is there have to be rules, standards that things are made to, otherwise parts will not fit together.

In the past five years a new manufacturing process has evolved where most people can design and build their own complex parts. There are a range of processes but in essence they all build up plastic or other materials by laying down successive thin layers. The layers shape and location are derived from a 3D computer model of the part. These machines can be bought ready made for as little as £1000 with a license for a 3D software package and a decent amount of raw material included. Within 5 years I expect to see toy versions, printing out new toys, for under £100 and you can find out more in some earlier blog posts on this site.

Which brings me to the point of this article, if we can all make things ourselves there will need to be some standards if we want to collaborate. Here http://www.thingiverse.com/uck are details and the actual 3D model files for something called 'Universal Connector Kit' or UCK. Essentially it is a set of parts that join different toy modelling kits together. LEGO to K'nex for example. Each system has its own standards to ensure all items in the system fit together, but now someone's come up with these UCK bits and most parts from different systems can be used in one model. I guess the companies, like LEGO, who own these copyrighted designs will not worry just yet as it still need very expensive machines and raw materials to make the pieces accurately, but the future may be worth pondering.

Now imagine you race model cars. Designing new suspension bits and printing them out using a bureau, (somewhere who does 3D Printing for you when you send them the model), is something many advanced competitors are now doing. If you can afford the machine and material cost, its cheaper than time spent laboriously working a piece of plastic into the right shape. But that part costs time to design and maybe you want to get back some of your costs by selling a few to other people, (This is happening online already) but then it will have to be made to fit on a customers standard car. This is the future that is coming, those with the technical skills to use 3D design will produce their own parts and share them, but will need to adhere to standards if these parts are to be interchangeable.

I am a member of an inventors club in Nottingham, a sleeping member really, but we have a couple of the really basic solid modellers and people are sharing 3D model files, usually of stand alone items like a whistle or a small character model. People are sharing models and parts so some standards will be needed if these parts are to fit together. If we are to realise the potential of 3D printing we will have to learn the same lessons that major manufacturers like Toyota, Sony, JCB, Apple etc have known and embedded into their systems all along, you need rules to be truly creative.

How much power, how much time, how much expertise

Half a century ago the Science Fiction Author Isaac Asimov wrote of Multivac. It was a huge single computer that everyone connected to with a terminal. A terminal is a device that merely displays the information sent to it by a smart computer somewhere else and sends back key presses. Every time you search Google you effectively use your £500 iPhone as a 'dumb terminal'. Huge computers with terminals pretty much ruled computing up till the first IBM compatible PC and the Mac's and Asimov imagined a world where a single huge computer ran everything, bit like Google really! Since then there has been two main strands of computing developing side by side. Schools and office type businesses do almost no processing on their servers, the servers store but the number crunching of the data happens on the individual computer. Huge institutions and universities that have to manipulate ,karge amount of data use racks of servers and increasingly 'virtual computers'.

I have written before about the danger of having your data too far away, but lets look at the opposite approach, put EVERYTHING on the cloud, including the actual computers that are doing the thinking, and save a ton of money and hassle. This autumn Windows 8.0 will be released and the world will be locked into a cycle of upgrading. The computer that was good enough today will seem slow and the new whizzy bits and pieces will only work well if you upgrade... or so it will seem. But what if the computer was not in your school or home, but instead only the 'dumb terminal', the keyboard and mouse that interacted with a computer tens hundreds or even thousands of miles away? In fact, don't bother with a single computer you operate remotely, instead use virtualisation where many 'computers' will run on a single high powered specialist box. Each user sees their own computer as though it was under their desk, but in reality it isn't actually 'there'.

Six months ago a seemingly small company called Onlive launched a gaming service, It costs about £300 to buy a playstation or xbox with 5 of the latest games and these games very quickly lose value. Onlive offered a virtual games console with games for a low monthly fee. You saw almost the same thing you would see on your tv if the actual games console was under it, but your tv or iPad or laptop or desktop computer acted as a dumb terminal, almost all its power was ignored and it instead became a way of viewing and interacting with streaming content live, the games. I was one of many who thought it was unlikely to work well given average internet speeds but surprisingly it does. You will never match the timing precision needed to play the very best people on-line as you are dependent on your speed of internet connection, no connection no input and kabloomey to your game score, but if you have the speed, you can play games originally developed for these incredibly powerful consoles on a humble laptop that couldn't display a few 3D boxes normally.

So whats this got to do with Multivac? Well, last Thursday Onlive announced a desktop version, a virtual windows 7 computer running office. Available only in America at the moment, it allows you to use a basic speed but effective computer running Word and Excel etc but from your own computer. Onlive have already released an iPad app so users in America (There seems little chance of getting it working here in the UK at present without jailbreaking your iPad) can use a full windows 7 desktop , edit real word documents, save load etc etc from their touchscreens. The amount of data that needs to be sent over the internet for such applications is tiny compared to fast moving and high resolution games but even better, upgrades patches and security features can be applied en masse at the server side. OnLive are talking about offering higher level packages for more power intensive programs. The idea of using the 3D package Maya from an iPad is amazing, but I think the biggest difference will be with the 90% of computing that most schools and offices do already. The professional version of onLive offers full office suite, a full web browser and more running on a windows 7 virtual computer that you can access on any reasonable computer at school, and your students can access on their PS3's, iPads, internet tellys and presumably eventually xBox phones and Wii consoles at home, for $10 a user a month. Even without quantity discounts, that means no more hiring office licenses, paying for people to install it and debug your systems, training up staff and constantly constantly upgrading to the latest system and patches just so your computers don't fall behind. Of course, no internet means no functionality but for many schools they are already in that position when they're management systems, pay rolls, almost everything, communicates through the Internet...

And MultiVac? It featured in many stories by Asimov, as a way of showing that such a system would know everything about you, could predict crimes based on patterns of behaviour, offer help in times of need, and that loss of privacy was the first casualty of increasingly relying on computers. He was quite far sighted really!

Future Present?

This blog is about a future present, or even a future project! I have attended a few demonstrations of solid modelling machines. Each was rather wonderful except for the cost of materials which still, for the professional machines from Hewlett Packard and Z Corp, cost about £180 kg. True a kg will go a long way if you make something tiny, but then there's the dreaded support material. If you make a dome as a frail shape of thin spars, you end up with a huge amount of support material underneath. This support material is usually the same or a significant proportion of the actual building material and is often not recyclable so a fairly simple model costs big time if it needs a lot of support as its built to keep structural integrity.

Of course you can design with minimal support material and use clever tricks to reduce the need for it but you are going to have to be a 3D graphics expert and an expert in 3D printing first if you wish to use those skills.

This means that companies who have hot designers can make the most efficient use of such 3D printing techniques. One such is http://www.myrobotnation.com/ which has an online HTML5 web tool which lets you build a simple robot and colour it in 3D. Then if you pay a fee, they will print it in full colour and send it to you. For small models this is fairly cheap, about £12 for a 50mm high one, but for 150mm high, because of the much higher manufacturing costs and volume of printing required, the price shoots up to £120! I strongly suspect the parts you choose from are hollow, to keep the volume and therefore amount of material used to a minimum. Careful design keeps the cost low and online design software means anyone can make a jazzy robot and those who wish to do so can print it.

You can save designs but only for 2 weeks, but this might be enough time to organise a robot competition and have the winners manufactured and posted from the companies manufacturing base in America... Perhaps some English Literature Sci Fi projects could get a lot more interesting, 3d, and real!

For those who know about the cheap abs meltign machines such as the Thing o Matic, they are great for those who have unlimited time or technicians. Perhaps another two generations of development (18 months time!) and well see truly excellent high resolution results at low cost on a school bench. Till then it s going to have to be 3D printing bureaus for making those wonderful full colour robots!