Hey there!
The team at Splatspace has been excited about this challenge since we heard of it. Even before we knew whether or not we had been picked for the challenge, people were signing on to form our Hackerspace Challenge team and throwing out ideas for what we could do.
We've had five team meetings over the past month or so and we think it's time to introduce ourselves with a blog post. We'll also take a moment to introduce the projects we're working on for the challenge, along with a very brief explanation for each.
Splatspace is a really young hackerspace (we've been around for less than a year) in Durham, NC, which is one corner of the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. We've got a good mix of electronics folks, programmers, and fabricators, and we've already embarked on a fair number of projects together.
The thing that has already risen to dominate the character of our space is education--we regularly hold classes to teach soldering and electronics to members who want to learn more and the general public, and we're collaborating with other groups to start new classes we can offer the community. With such a focus on teaching new skills, we were all very excited to take part in element14's education challenge.
Our team is composed of electronics folks, microcontroller folks, a fabricator or two, some programmers, some media people, an elementary school teacher, and a tutor. We are:
- Alan Dipert: programmer, CAD design
- Ashley Dipert: programmer, content, educator's insight
- Darren Boss: programmer, media
- Dino Segovis: fabrication, electronics, CAD design
- JC Sackett: media, programmer, blogger
- Jeff Crews: fabrication, CAD design
- Justis Peters: project management, arduino programming
- Kristen Bedell: educator's insight
- Mike Broome: programmer, electronics
- Peter Reintjes: electronics, hardware
- Skippy Hope: programmer, arduino
- Tom Billman: electronics, microcontrollers, PCB Design
We'll have more on our team in a later post!
Our early brainstorming revealed a number of small, elegant ideas. We had some early inertia around one project, which looked like critical mass, but debate continued around the merits of a couple other projects. In the spirit of "do-ocracy", we decided to just do all three projects until the relative merits become clearer. They're all great ideas and each one has a unique mixture of challenges and opportunities.
Consider it a small intraspace challenge--the winner in a week or two will become the project we all pursue wholeheartedly for the remainder of the challenge. And we'll all be happy with it, because we'll know it's one that's already survived a challenge.
Here's what we're looking at so far.
Music education often gets overlooked, but it's still very important. It can be difficult to introduce musical concepts to children without teaching them a lot of motor skills first. You have to learn to hold your fingers in unfamiliar positions and then you have to get them to coordinate rhythmically. Then, you have to learn to read music. Those are a lot of obstacles to jump over for a child and those obstacles often stand in the way of them discovering what joy and fun music can be.
Our music player removes these obstacles by making the creation of music as easy placing magnets on a refrigerator. The layout of the notes is much like a piano roll or the "tracker" interface used on many popular audio programs for personal computers. For playback, you just roll the player across the composition surface.
This idea seems to be a popular one with hackerspaces! Similar to other teams, we're designing a set of blocks that engage the participant in educational exercises. They are a tactile interface, reminiscent of the alphabet blocks that many kids play with, and they become way more exciting when you throw in a microcontroller, a few sensors, and feedback components. Our current design has only numeric display and the proposed exercises are about numbers, counting, sets, fractions, and arithmetic.
Our design priorities for this project are:
- Stay focused on numbers, keeping the exercises simple to internationalize.
- Prototype fast; optimize cost later.
- Quickly design an API, so that a content team can start working in parallel.
- Make it easy to program in the field, with hopes of starting a community of content producers.
- Keep the design flexible, so that lower cost parts can later be substituted.
- Concentrate the expensive parts in a "master station" and minimize the cost per block, allowing for affordable exercises that involve many blocks.
Have you ever tried to explain physics to elementary school students? It's not easy. That whole notion of force, acceleration, and the rest just isn't that intuitive. The gravity ball (not necessarily the final name) uses an accelerometer and LEDs to help illustrate these concepts in a hands-on way for young students, letting them see the force and acceleration as they throw a ball around or drop it and bounce it off of things.
So, there you have it, the quick thumbnail portrait of who we are and what we're doing. We'll have some fleshing out of these ideas and how we selected them in some posts that are coming up soon. Keep reading!