Creativity Quest at University Northern Colorado

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.