The interactive modular physical computing kits are coming fast and thick these days! Now, in addition to relative newcomers such as Sifteo and LittleBits, along with more familiar kits such as the Bug System, Phidgets, and classics such as LEGO Mindstorms, there’s a new kid in town: Cubelets from Modular Robotics. Unlike other modular cube-shaped pluggables, cubelets don’t come with a screen. And they are very physical, which is not surprising for a project which spun off from Carnegie Mellon.
“Cubelets are magnetic blocks that can be snapped together to make an endless variety of robots with no programming and no wires. You can build robots that drive around on a tabletop, respond to light, sound, and temperature, and have surprisingly lifelike behavior. But instead of programming that behavior, you snap the cubelets together and watch the behavior emerge like with a flock of birds or a swarm of bees.”
The collection of magnetic modular units are made up of three categories of blocks, which represent the three basic elements of physical computing: sensing, “thinking”, and actuating. They join with magnets and, no doubt, a satisfying “click”. Snap them together in a valid configuration and away they go (check out the video with the quirky-accented presenter). Judging by the photograph featuring kids using them, they will be targeted at young learners too. It will be interesting to see if the learning activities created for them will be as thoroughly considered as the engineering for the cubelets themselves.
As usual with hot-off-the-press tech, these are only available for pre-order for $160.00, but I think I’ll get in queue now.
This week, the Guardian has an excellent series on digital literacy (on the heels of Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s harsh criticism of the current state of computer science education in the UK, last August). Industry is not being served and neither are students, in schools or in Higher Education and this is finally starting to get some exposure, though to anyone who is working in teaching and learning computing, this has been apparent for a long time. What might be surprising is how long it has taken the policy makers to figure out that this is a key area for economic growth in the UK. It is just a shame that awareness wasn’t raised long before more rash actions were taken, such as the closure of Becta.
What is to be done about this? There are many answers to this question and it’s one reason that the Guardian series makes for good reading. The series highlights the many aspects of the problem, from shortage of qualified teachers, to obliviousness of ministers, to programmes that don’t produce qualified candidates (apparently 14% of computer science graduates still don’t have a job after 6 months), to offshoring of key skills that industry needs, which I mentioned in this article.
The good news is that with the Eye of Mordor turning its attention to the subject, we might perhaps see more support given for improving both pedagogy and research in Computing education. I have my fingers crossed. If you have a moment, saunter over and get a good look, it will confirm your suspicions and just maybe, you’ll cross your fingers too.
Farnell have a pretty nifty new enclosure for Arduinos. It’s a specially-designed, black ABS plastic housing that’s injection moulded and contains bosses to hold the Arduino in place. The location of the bosses means that you can either leave the enclosure “as is” for mounting a standard Arduino or if you wish to secure one of the Arduino Megas, you can to remove a boss with a pair of side cutters or a blade. Or you could simply snap it off.
An Arduino Uno/Mega fits perfectly inside, with extra room for a 9V battery and there’s a little inspection door as well. At first glance, I thought the door would facilitate replacing the battery, but it’s more suited to being able to access the reset switch on either a standard- or a mega- size Arduino. Add to this, the box is large enough to also contain a shield, and best of all, there is a knock-out plate that can accommodate an ethernet shield, too. The bulge this creates on the top of the box is slightly inconvenient, and the housing will not lay flat on that side, but this is a minor issue. The obverse has a sligtly recessed face which could accommodate a decorative label or of course, the necessary radioactive/hazmat warning.
At about £9.00 plus shipping, the price is slightly on the high-side. But considering that it is perfectly suited for its job, and you don’t need to muck about with drilling even a single hole simply to house an Arduino project (as you would with a generic enclosure), it’s pretty much worth the cost. Shoot on over to Farnell to pick one up one of these little guys.
Note: the photo on the website makes it appear to be a semi-transparent enclosure, but this is simply to show that the enclosure can also accommodate an Arduino shield. The housing is solid, opaque black.
Along with my colleague Yishay Mor, I will be chairing a workshop on Learning Design at the London Knowledge Lab in October. We’ll be investigating several thematic strands in Learning Design, including:
Theoretical Frameworks
Tools and Resources
Practices & Methods
Representations
Check out the CFP at the workshop website and make your travel plans now. It promises to be a truly engaging event!
I’m very pleased to announce that an app I’ve been working on for the past few months, Mammals on Roads (MoR), has finally been released on the iTunes App Store. The app allows “citizen scientists” to participate in the Mammals on Roads survey run by the People’s trust for Endangered Species (in the UK only). It’s essentially a tool for logging roadkill sightings – but on a positive note, contributes to a multi-year study on endangered mammals in the UK. And it’s a lot easier and more accurate to record sightings on the phone than on the old paper surveys!
The release of MoR almost coincided with another app, iBats (see my Projects and posts about that). Special thanks are due to my colleagues Adam Talcott and Crystal Campbell for their excellent collaboration on the project.
The Stanford Visualization Group have been responsible for a number of fantastic tools for supporting information visualisation work. One of the inherent problems in creating data visualisations is that you usually do not get the data in a format that is particularly easy to work with. Cleaning up the data is one of the first things that you must to, so that you can take out extraneous data points, pare down to what you want to actually work with, and then format the information logically, so that it will be easy to incorporate into your visualisation software or code.
This step, data cleaning, is usually a real hassle and Excel is not very good for the task, because it’s not really made to do this sort of thing. Although you can delimit by commas, tabs or arbitrary characters, it’s a pain to write regular expressions that allow you to take out things or re-order them. You can write scripts to do this, but then you’re busy writing scripts instead of creating a visualization.
That’s why I’m very excited about Wrangler, a new tool for data wrangling that substantially reduces the pain associated with this process.
Check out their video and head on over to try it for yourself!
At the Art.on.Wires Festival in May I talked about three recent projects: spacehoppers, my visualization of the Londons bicycle hire system, and NetChimes. I discussed some of the technical details about how these projects were realised and reflected upon the process of building those interactions. I aso demoed the NetChimes audio feed with participants in the audience tuning in, during the talk. Art.on.Wires had a really good feel this year, very cozy, with lots of people learning, hacking, chatting and making things happen. There were several live performances involving collaboration with off-site musicians and dancers, with live feeds streaming in from around the world. My friend Jason Geistweidt had a preview of work he has been doing in the process of creating the World Opera, involving dancers from southern California and dancers in Oslo interacting via life-size video projections and audio. Nice stuff.
Video of my talk is below, but note the title is “Connecting the Physical and the Digital” and not “Of Bits and Bikes” which I presented in London at sameAs.
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The interactive modular physical computing kits are coming fast and thick these days! Now, in addition to relative newcomers such as Sifteo and LittleBits, along with more familiar kits such as the Bug System, Phidgets, and classics such as LEGO Mindstorms, there’s a new kid in town: Cubelets from Modular Robotics. Unlike other modular cube-shaped pluggables, cubelets don’t come with a screen. And they are very physical, which is not surprising for a project which spun off from Carnegie Mellon.
Themocracy