Creativity Quest is a monthly Saturday program for creative and/or high potential learners. This program is sponsored by the Center for Education and Study of Gifted, Talented, and Creative Learners, University of Northern Colorado at Greeley. We have an opportunity to use our Electronic Stream Table to teach lesson in Erosion. It is exciting to be able to see how the students used the prototype of the product and heard their comments.
We used the Intel Edison for the prototype which communicates using wifi. There were several improvements from the solution at Intel Hackathon. One improvement is based on the feedback from SteamFest. Instead of displaying a photo, the apps will display video of the real stream table experiment when the students select the scenario. Another feature added were the ability to select between sands or rocks substrate. The video will be played from YouTube, which means the product has dependency to the Internet connection.
Unfortunately the dependency becomes the achilles heel. The wifi system inside the University of Northern Colorado has some security features that is causing both the computer and Intel Edison couldn't be in the same network. This is causing the YouTube video isn't accessible. Luckily we were able to replace it back to photos, and play the YouTube video from the university's computer. The class survived!!
The class allowed us to test the usability of the product, and to observe how the kids use the digital stream table. Although the best lesson that we learned is to remove the dependency to the wifi system. Setting up this environment multiple times, whether it's in SteamFest, or during another experiments in Monarch K-8 in Louisville, we observed using the wifi in Edison will be a continuous challenge for the setup. We need to use Bluetooth.
Rocky Mountain STEAM Fest at Boulder County Fairgounds
Rocky Mountain STEAM Fest is where you want to be to check out latest development on education and maker communities The E is actually for Entrepreneur. 4000 kids of all ages were in the event, along with parents who has interest in STEM or wants their kids to be exposed in STEM.
Our participation in the STEAM Fest this year is not trying to sell the products ... yet. We want to learn whether there are customer needs with this product. Taken a page from 4 Steps to Epiphany by Steve Blank, our goal is to talk to parents and educators and learn their interest and needs for a technology product that use hands-on approach to teach STEM.
The event was a huge success for us, as we received plenty of feedback. We observed how the kids like the product, and in one case the kid immediately asked the parent whether they could purchase the product (well .. unfortunately we are not ready to sell yet). We also received additional suggestions, such as some parent want to incorporate the technology portion by letting the kids to assemble the product themselves (sounds like an excellent idea). Many thoughts that this product should be part of the schools, since it really helps the learning process. And some parents would like to purchase it themselves when it becomes available.
We showed two of our prototypes: the Erosion lesson where we won the prize in Intel Hackathon, and the earlier Soundwave lesson. We also showed some of the concept product in the form of video, and it attracted many people. We received many contacts for potential customers and collaborators. Overall we considered the exhibition was a great success and we received confirmation on the product that we are developing.
Last weekend we went to Intel Internet-Of-Things Hackathon, a two days event Saturday and Sunday in University of Denver, and came back winning third place for our project. Here is the view from a first-timer hackathon.
We have been working with STEM Launch in Thornton, Colorado to try to solve a problem in Science teaching. The week before the hackathon, we finally defined the pain point. The problem is on how to teach Erosion and Deposition, part of Earth Science subject. Typically teacher will use water table, such as in this video. It may take days for the preparation, and then minutes for the experiment. It also tends to be messy so that it discourage the usage of this approach. Unfortunately this will cause the hands-on activity missed out in the learning process.
After the meeting, my partner and I discussed how to solve this problem, and suddenly a light bulb moment sparked. We are going to Intel IOT Hackathon, and we can pitch this idea. We figured out what kind of sensors that we can add, such as gyroscope to sense the inclination.
I pitched this idea of Education Technology to teach Erosion lesson. Five minutes .. ten minutes .. half an hour .. nobody approached me. Even three folks from my table left (okay, they probably just came to get the free Intel Edison kit, as I didn't see them anymore throughout the event). Hmm .. I started doubting myself that this may not be a good idea. But I decided to charge ahead and approached some folks to join my team. Four folks joined my team, all newbies and I was the only developer. Although all of them are smart folks, and all contributed to the completion of the project. In retrospect, after the events couple of people came to me and mentioned they actually considering to join my team. So the lesson here is "Don't give up if you don't see any sign/feedback immediately"
The steepest learning curve is to acquire the knowledge on node.js as a webserver. I have used other web server prior to this, but have not touched node.js and minimally used javascript. After unsuccessful attempt to reuse the sample code on Saturday, I decided to start my Sunday at 5 am to do crash course on node.js. This tutorial and the nodejs documentation assisted me through the early morning class on node.js. By 9 am, I understood how it works, had some code - still buggy, and joined my team back at University of Denver.
It was final 2 hours, the application is still not working. I started thinking that we are fighting the wrong battle since the problem is in understanding how node.js works, not in the hardware or the sensor. Finally in desperation I went back to the template code and made the modification one at a time. Around 12:30 pm the code finally worked ... phew, and for the next hour we added the rest of the functionalities back. The hardware portion is so smooth thanks to one of the team member (Sir James Fleit), that it is a matter of copy and paste the code and they just worked. Half an hour before the deadline we have all functionalities worked and tested, and I was totally exhausted. After several tests, we decided to stop tinkering and waited for the final bell.
We are team number 11 out of 13 teams. During the presentation I checked out the body language of the judges and they seemed already exhausted and uninterested, and we only got 1 question. I thought this is not a good sign. So I was totally blown when we were announced to win the third place. One of the judge later stopped by and asked us about other product that we have created. This is really adding conviction to myself that what we are doing is in the right direction. I came home physically tired but mentally ready to continue the journey.
