Not just an ordinary pair of gloves

Two University of Washington undergraduates have won a $10,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for gloves that can translate sign language into text or speech.

The Lemelson-MIT Student Prize is a nationwide search for the most inventive undergraduate and graduate students. This year, UW sophomores Navid Azodi and Thomas Pryor — who are studying business administration and aeronautics and astronautics engineering, respectively — won the “Use It” undergraduate category that recognizes technology-based inventions to improve consumer devices.

Their invention, “SignAloud,” is a pair of gloves that can recognize hand gestures that correspond to words and phrases in American Sign Language. Each glove contains sensors that record hand position and movement and send data wirelessly via Bluetooth to a central computer. The computer looks at the gesture data through various sequential statistical regressions, similar to a neural network. If the data match a gesture, then the associated word or phrase is spoken through a speaker.

They honed their prototype in the UW CoMotion MakerSpace — a campus space that offers communal tools and equipment and opportunities for students to tinker, create and innovate. For Azodi and Pryor, that meant finding a way to translate American Sign Language into a verbal form instantaneously and in an ergonomic fashion.

“Many of the sign language translation devices already out there are not practical for everyday use. Some use video input, while others have sensors that cover the user’s entire arm or body,” said Pryor, an undergraduate researcher in the Composite Structures Laboratory in the Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics and software lead for the Husky Robotics Team.

“Our gloves are lightweight, compact and worn on the hands, but ergonomic enough to use as an everyday accessory, similar to hearing aids or contact lenses,” said Pryor.

Collecting trash in space

A satellite that gets rid of space junk could help prevent devastating collisions in Earth orbit.

Satellites play big roles in modern life. Some look downward to monitor environmental conditions on Earth. Others look outward in search of major solar flares that can disrupt the transmission of electrical power to homes and businesses. Some spy on our enemies. Others relay communications around the globe. But all of these million-dollar marvels of technology can be knocked out by a collision with space junk — debris from satellites and other Earthly technology orbiting high above the planet. Now, a teen from Jordan has designed a satellite to chase down space junk, collect it and then dispose of it.

NASA is the U.S. space agency. It and other organizations are tracking about 500,000 pieces of space junk that are currently orbiting Earth. Many come from satellites or rockets that have blown up and shattered. The objects being tracked are the size of a marble or larger. About 20,000 are at least the size of a softball (some are as large as a refrigerator). Most are too small to detect from Earth’s surface. In all, some 100 million pieces of debris likely orbit Earth today, says 15-year-old Dana Arabiyat. She attends Alridwan Schools in Amman, Jordan.

Even bits of space junk as small as flecks of paint pose a threat, says Dana. That’s because this debris orbits our planet at speeds up to some 28,200 kilometers per hour (17,500 miles per hour). That’s about 7.8 kilometers per second! Such blistering speed explains why tiny paint flecks have chipped the windshields of space shuttles so badly that they needed to be replaced.

Researchers have come up with many ideas for getting rid of space junk. Some have suggested vaporizing small bits with lasers. Others have proposed launching satellites to collect the debris. Dana’s design falls into this category.

Here’s how hers would work: A radar system aboard the satellite would scan for and find a piece of space junk. Then, thrusters would change the satellite’s orbit so that it could chase down the errant object. As the satellite closed in on its prey, cameras would keep it on target.

Just how effective are language learning apps?

Around 70 million people – including Bill Gates – have signed up for the language learning app Duolingo. The app has received plenty of media attention, and its creators claim that it can help anyone with a smart phone learn a new language.

The app is free, and promises all kinds of cutting edge features, such as adaptive algorithms to suit users’ learning speed, as well as gamification to boost motivation. They also claim that this app can provide members of poorer communities with access to language learning that would otherwise be denied them; a worthy aim indeed.

For those who haven’t tried it, Duolingo works as follows. The user is introduced to some vocabulary, and then every day they spend a few minutes doing language exercises, such as translating sentences.

There is a level of adaptivity: words that you get wrong come up again and again, while words that you get right come up less often – although they do still appear. This recycling and repetition is a core element of the app – it is what the creators hope will eventually lead to acquisition of new vocabulary. As users complete the exercises successfully, they can move up through the “levels”, and unlock bonus lessons on “flirting” and “idioms”.

Language learning in theory

As experienced language teachers, we wanted to think about whether or not this technology is really cutting edge. Clearly the delivery mechanism is new, and textbook writers would be amazed at selling 70 million copies. But in a field filled with spirited – and sometimes acrimonious – academic theorising about language learning, it’s worth investigating where Duolingo fits in.

The earliest modern language instruction was called “grammar translation”. It focused on translating sentences and learning the rules of the grammar as the primary goal. This type of rote learning is how many people learned Latin – including Monty Python’s Brian. It is also the method used by the teachers of generations of happy English tourists to France, who ended up knowing how to conjugate a verb, but utterly unable to make themselves understood without shouting in a strange type of pidgin English with a French accent.

Keeping roofs cooler to cut energy costs

A simple paint-on coating might cut home energy use and urban pollution, a teen’s research suggests.

PITTSBURGH, Pa. — The roof of a house can get pretty hot in the summer. Even if there is an insulated attic below, some of that heat can work its way into the living space. That can make air conditioners work harder and pump up electricity bills. But a thin, paint-like coating could help keep roofs cooler, a teen researcher finds. And in urban areas, widespread use of her new roofing treatment might even cut the formation of lung-irritating ozone on hot days.

Shingles come in many colors, but dark ones are especially popular, says Jesseca Kusher. The 18-year old attends Spartanburg Day School in South Carolina. Like most dark objects, shingles absorb a lot of heat from sunlight. In the summer sun, they can easily reach 73.5° Celsius (164° Fahrenheit), she notes. If those shingles reflected more sunlight, they’d stay cooler. And that could help cut down on home cooling bills. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, air conditioning consumes about 5 percent of all the energy used in the United States. Cooling buildings costs the nation about $11 billion each year.

So Jesseca looked into ways to make shingles reflect more light. She mixed tiny particles — a powder — made from any of several different substances into a clear paint-like coating. One coating got graphite, the same material in pencil lead. Another recipe included gypsum. That’s a soft mineral often found in the drywall used in construction. She even tried adding mica. That’s a mineral used in some lampshades. It readily breaks into small, glittering flakes.

Each of these powders came in several colors. In each of Jesseca’s test recipes, her reflective powder accounted for 40 percent of the weight of the final mixture. She also prepared some of the paint-like coatings with no additive. That would let her judge whether a powder — versus the transparent goop it was added to — affected a shingle’s reflectivity, she explains.

Jesseca used four different colored shingles. She painted each of her concoctions onto bits of each color of shingle and let them dry for 24 hours. Then, to simulate how the shingles would heat up in summer, she placed each postage-stamp-size sample under a 150-watt sun lamp. (Those bulbs send out radiation across a wide band of wavelengths, similar to those emitted by the sun.) Each test sample was irradiated for 15 minutes, or until the untreated shingles reached a temperature of 73.5 °C, whichever came first. To measure how hot each sample got, the teen used an instrument that measures the infrared radiation (heat) emitted by an object.

How technology is changing speech and language therapy

From robots that play peekaboo, to speech recognition software that analyses TV shows, tech is being used to aid human communication.

Speech and communication skills are at the heart of human relationships – without them we couldn’t share ideas and emotions. But technology is carving out a special role in boosting those skills. Pioneering research shows just how machines are helping people to make themselves understood.

Here we look at three projects where a range of academic specialists and industry partners have come together to develop and widen access to their innovations.

Kaspar the robot: helping children with autism communicate 

Meet Kaspar: he can be talked to, tickled, stroked, played with and you can even prod and poke him and he won’t run away. Kaspar, developed at the University of Hertfordshire by a team under professor Kerstin Dautenhahn, is a child-like talking robot with a simplified human face and moveable limbs and features. He’s designed to help children with autism develop essential social skills through games such as peekaboo and learning activities.

Kaspar, the size of a small child, was “born” back in 2005 and has been developed since thanks to funding raised by the university. The multi-disciplinary scope of the project, spanning robotics, psychology, assistive technology and autism therapy, harnesses technology to assist communication. But this broad approach means it falls between research council stools and misses out on their grants, says Dautenhahn.

Initially, Kaspar has been used to help children in schools under the supervision of researchers. In the latest phase of the research, redesigned, wireless and more personalised versions of the little robot – controlled using a tablet - will to go out directly to schools and families in the next few weeks.

Parents and teachers will play games such as encouraging autistic youngsters to mimic and discuss different facial expressions, or even to pinch him and discuss why he cries out and looks sad, recording the results for the Hertfordshire team to analyse. “This is a new field study phase where Kaspar will go out into the world without the helping hand of researchers,” says Dautenhahn, whose work has combined both academic research – including collaboration with psychologists and clinicians - and the nuts and bolts of developing the robot as a potential mass product.

It is Kaspar’s highly predictable, simplified interactions that appeal to autistic children who may be overwhelmed by the complexity of everyday human communication, she believes.

“His simplicity appeals to children, and the fact that they can respond to him in their own time. If you are silent for 60 seconds, Kaspar won’t mind – he doesn’t make judgments.”

3-D Recycling: Grind, melt print!

A new desktop recycler turns trash into 3-D printer ‘ink'.

Three-dimensional, or 3-D, printers make it possible to “print” almost any object with a computer. The machines produce items by laying down tiny drops, or pixels, of material one layer at a time. That material can be made from plastic, metal or even human cells. But just as the ink for standard computer printers can be expensive, 3-D printer “ink” can be quite pricey too. Meanwhile, society faces a growing mound of plastic trash. Now three Canadian engineering students have found a way to deal with both problems: Recycle plastic waste into spools of 3-D printer ink. 

The first part of their new machine is a plastic recycler. It grinds and crushes waste plastic into uniform bits about the size of peas or large grains of rice. The waste can be used drink bottles, coffee cup lids or other plastics. But this trash must be clean.

Users must grind only one type of plastic in any given batch. Otherwise, the ink-making part of the process may not work well, notes Dennon Oosterman. He worked on the new machine with fellow students Alex Kay and David Joyce. All three attend the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

The machine stores the plastic bits in a drawer until there are enough for a spool of “ink.” Then those bits go into the next part of the machine. It’s called an extruder.

To extrude something means to push it out. To do that, this part of the system first melts the plastic bits. A little of that melted plastic attaches to a spool. The spool then turns, pulling a long, thin thread of the plastic out of the machine. “You can think about stretching gum apart,” explains Oosterman. But instead of becoming a mess of stringy goo, the plastic cools and winds neatly onto the spool.

The machine pulls out and winds as much as three meters (10 feet) of plastic thread per minute. At that rate, it takes roughly two hours to make a one-kilogram (2.2 pound) spool of plastic thread. That’s about 40 percent faster than other small-scale plastic-ink makers, Oosterman says.

‘Smart’ clothes generate electricity

New fabric harvests energy from its wearer.

You’ll get a charge out of the clothes of the future. Scientists in South Korea have developed a flexible, foldable and wearable fabric that generates electricity as it bends and flexes. A person wearing a shirt tailored from the material only has to move around to power a small screen or other electronic devices.

The advance represents an important step toward making wearable power sources a reality, says Yunlong Zi. He’s a physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, who did not work on the new fabric. In his own lab, he studies ways to harvest energy. “Cell phones need batteries, but batteries have limited life,” he notes. With clothing that can generate electricity, he notes, that’s no longer an issue: “You can make power by yourself.”

Sang-Woo Kim led the development of this new material. He works at Sungkyunkwan University in Suwon, South Korea. A shirt made from the new fabric can be worn — even patched — like any other item of clothing. “It feels like an ordinary jacket,” he told Science News for Students.

Fully equipped, it's just a tad on the heavy side, he acknowledges. That added weight comes from the electronic gizmos the researchers wired into the shirt. For tests, these included small screens, lights and even a keyless remote. Press the shirt’s cuff, for instance, and the remote unlocks a car's doors.

How it works

The power-generating material is known as a wearable triboelectric (TRI-bo-ee-LEK-trik) nanogenerator, or WTNG. Here’s what that means: Triboelectricity refers to electricity generated by friction. Friction is the resistance encountered when one material moves over or through another material. People feel friction (in the form of heat) when they rub their hands together. In fact, the prefix tribo comes from the Greek word for rubbing. Meanwhile, nano is a prefix meaning a billionth. The material includes tiny zinc-oxide rods only billionths of a meter long. Those spiky nanoparticles help convert motion into electricity.

This ‘smart’ self-cleaning keyboard is powered by you

The bonus: It works for its owner and no one else.

 

A new keyboard can tell if you’re its owner. It locks out anyone else, even if that person knows your password. What’s more, this device needs no batteries. It harvests all the energy it needs from the action of your typing.

All in all, “This will hugely improve the security of a computer,” predicts Zhong Lin Wang. He’s a materials scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and a co-designer of the new keyboard.
“Our fingertips have electrostatic charges,” explains Wang. That means there’s an imbalance of electrons. Your fingertips generally have a slight positive charge. So they have somewhat fewer electrons than the area around them. And that principle makes it possible for typing to induce an electric current in the keyboard, Wang points out.

To understand how this works, consider a magnet. At one end is a positive charge. At the other is a negative charge. Opposite poles attract. So if you put the positive end of one magnet next to the negative one of another, they will latch onto each other. A similar idea applies to electrostatic charges. Positive charges attract negative ones.

Wang’s group put two layers of metal electrodes under the keyboard’s plastic surface. When a finger approaches a key, it attracts free electrons to the top electrode. The bottom electrode supplies them. As soon as the finger lifts off of the key, the electrons flow back to the lower electrode. Any flow of electrons creates an electric current.

And this induced electric current can power the keyboard — but only if the current is strong enough. To achieve that, the Georgia Tech team focused on nanotechnology. (“Nano-“ refers to things measured on the scale of 100 billionths of a meter or less.)

'Smart’ windows could save energy

Tiny droplets sandwiched between glass panes turn cloudy when it’s hot outside; this filter out some warming sunlight.

 

 
Sunlight streaming through a window can really heat up a room. In winter, when heating bills can soar, people tend to welcome that extra warmth. But in summer, that heat just boosts cooling costs. A homeowner could keep out some of that warming light by drawing the curtains or lowering the blinds. Or the window could change its transparency — blocking out some light, as needed — all by itself. That’s the idea behind new “smart” windows.

Some smart windows already exist. They work just like large versions of the LCDs (liquid crystal diodes) found in watches and other electronic devices. When an electric current flows through an LCD window, a coating on the panes of its glass darken. That blocks out some of the light. A homeowner can control the window’s light-blocking ability — or opacity — simply by flipping a switch. Or, a sensor connected to the window can automatically control the current, just like the thermostat used to control a furnace or air conditioner.

But the new smart window does not require such electronics. It depends only on the temperature outdoors, says Xuhong Guo. He’s a chemical engineer at the East China University of Science and Technology in Shanghai. His team designed a new liquid that it sandwiches between two panes of window glass. The researchers describe how this makes their window “smart” in the December 3 issue of Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.

The key: A heat sensitive gel

The material that Guo’s team designed is a colloid. That’s a substance in which tiny particles or droplets that don’t dissolve are spread throughout a larger volume of some other material. (Smoky air is one type of colloid. Milk is another.) The larger part of the new mix is a blend of water and alcohol. Floating inside are tiny globs of a gel.

Each glob is only between 200 and 700 nanometers across. That makes the diameter of the thinnest human hair about 24 to 85 times wider than each glob. The gel contains a heat-sensitive polymer (a chemical made from chain-shaped molecules). It also contains water and glycerol, a type of alcohol. The water and glycerol attach loosely to the polymer. This keeps the gel from dissolving into the larger volume of liquid. This also ensures that the gel globs don’t react with each other to form one big lump of goo.

How to deal with electronic waste? Make it a national security issue

We’re in the midst of fevered discussions about communications and security. Cybertarian campaigners want to stop collusion between corporations and governments to intercept citizen chat; attention-grabbing adolescents at Anonymous want to disrupt murderers who dislike mockery of their principal prophet and the gilt-edged grown-ups in national security services want to listen in on plans to revenge such blasphemy.

But away from these dramatic debates over speech, privacy, the state, a less exciting conversation is underway, beyond the third-sector moralism of cybertarians, the attention span of adolescents, and the Olympian speechifying of spymasters. This conversation touches on security and communications in a less spectacular way.

Do you know what your old phone is up to?

Electronic waste (or e-waste) is the largest source of materials left in municipal dumps around the world.

A high proportion of it is derived from the gadgets you are reading this article on: phones, tablets, and computers, which quickly move from being vital sources of everyday life to discarded garbage once an upgrade becomes available. Where did that old fat-screen analogue television go when it was replaced by the slim, flat-screen digital version? Where are those phones you threw out?

A vast proportion of these deadly gizmos, with their lethal cocktails of carcinogenic gases and chemicals, end up being unsafely recycled by the poorest of the poor, the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. Pre-teen girls in Chinese and Indian villages are expert at the dangerous work of extracting recyclable minerals from our detritus.

Increasingly, of course, the trade in e-waste is domestic. Asian middle classes are booming and as keen as their so-called “Western” counterparts to fetishise the fresh and new by dumping the toxic and the old in the villages and bodies of the desperate. The result is horrendous disease, a poisoned water table, and drifting air pollution.

Rewritable paper: Prints with light, not ink

A new paper design could eliminate tons of landfill waste.

 

 

A new type of paper can be used and reused up to 20 times. What’s more, it doesn’t require any ink. Its designers think that this new technology could cut down on tons of waste — and save people tons of money.
A special dye embedded in the paper makes it printable and rewritable. The dye goes from dark to clear and back when chemical reactions move electrons around. (Electrons are the subatomic particles that orbit in the outer regions of an atom.) The paper’s color-change chemical undergoes what are known as redox reactions. Redox is short for reduction and oxidation.
Oxidation steals one or more electrons from a molecule. Rust is an example of oxidation. “When iron rusts in air, its electrons move to nearby oxygen atoms,” explains Yadong Yin. He’s a chemist at the University of California, Riverside.

Reduction is the opposite of oxidation. It adds one or more electrons. As rust oxidizes iron, the process reduces those nearby oxygen atoms. That means that they gain electrons, which have a negative charge.

When dye in the new paper is oxidized, it appears blue, red or green. (What color depends on which dye is in the paper.) When the dye on some parts is reduced, color on those areas disappears. Controlling these two reactions makes it possible to print on, erase and reuse the new paper.

The starting base of the “paper” used in the study was a clear plastic. That allowed it to show how the paper works. But the technology also could be used with glass or conventional paper — the type made from wood pulp — as long as each contains the redox dyes and the other chemically active components.

How it works

The paper starts out with all of the dye oxidized, and therefore colored. Nano-scale crystals of titanium dioxide — each around a billionth-of-a-meter in size — cover the paper’s surface.

Gadgets have their place in education, but they’re no substitute for knowledge

The immense computing power we possess will only make learning easier if we acknowledge it will never make it effortless.

The children returning to school this week with their new Christmas gadgets don’t remember a world without smartphones, tablets, e-readers and laptops. For some, this generation of digital natives are using technology in collaborative and social ways that will revolutionise learning. Others worry about the damage these devices are doing to their concentration spans and their ability to think deeply.

So what is the truth about technology and education? Is it better to read War and Peace on a Kindle or on paper? Or should we forgo 19th-century novels completely in favour of co-creating our own stories on Facebook? As a recent New Scientist article acknowledged, the rapid pace of technological change means large-scale studies of many of these issues are lacking. However, there is some reliable research.

For example, there’s good evidence that one of the most popular claims made for technology is false. It has been said by many – from headteachers to union reps to Today presenters – that the internet reduces the importance of knowing facts. However, research from cognitive science shows the vital importance of remembering facts. When we think, we use working memory and long-term memory. Long-term memory is vast, but working memory is limited to about four to seven items and is easily overloaded. By committing facts to long-term memory, we free up precious space in our working memory to manipulate those facts and combine them with new ones.

That’s why it’s so important for pupils to learn their times tables: memorising them doesn’t stifle conceptual understanding but rather enables it. We also need a framework of facts in long-term memory to make sense of what we find on the internet; studies show that pupils frequently make errors when asked to look up unfamiliar knowledge. Long-term memory is not a bolted-on part of the mind that we can outsource to the cloud. It is integral to all our thinking processes; researchers even suggest it may be “the seat of human intellectual skill”.

While technology won’t remove the need for us to remember facts, it may make it easier for us to learn them. Another big insight from cognitive psychology is that we remember what we think about. In the words of Prof Dan Willingham of the University of Virginia, memory is the residue of thought.

Ebooks at night won’t help you sleep tight, US study finds

Harvard researchers say light-emitting ebooks negatively affect our sleep and lead to next-day grogginess.

Reading a light-emitting ebook before bed is bad for your health, according to a new US study. It warned that use of the devices affected both sleep at night and alertness the following morning.
Researchers from Harvard Medical School’s sleep medicine department put 12 healthy young adults through a two-week experiment, in which the participants would either read a light-emitting ebook for four hours before bedtime or a printed book. Study participants reading a light-emitting ebook took on average almost 10 minutes longer to fall asleep and said they were less sleepy an hour before bedtime than they were reading a paper book.

They also had suppressed evening levels of the sleep-promoting hormone melatonin – readers of print showed no suppression – and significantly less REM (rapid eye movement) sleep than print book participants. The next morning, they took “hours longer to fully ‘wake up’ and attain the same level of alertness”, researchers have reported in a new paper published in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Harvard’s Anne-Marie Chang, Daniel Aeschbach, Jeanne Duffy and Charles Czeisler wrote that sleep quality and duration has declined over the past 50 years, adversely affecting general health. They point to a recent survey which found that 90% of Americans use an electronic gadget at least a few nights a week before going to sleep. The Harvard study participants were reading on an iPad, but researchers said other devices would cause the same effect. (Lead researcher Czeisler told the BBC: “The light emitted by most ereaders is shining directly into the eyes of the reader, whereas from a printed book or the original Kindle the reader is only exposed to reflected light from the pages of the book.”)

In the paper the researchers write: “The use of light-emitting electronic devices for reading, communication, and entertainment has greatly increased recently. We found that the use of these devices before bedtime prolongs the time it takes to fall asleep, delays the circadian clock, suppresses levels of the sleep-promoting hormone melatonin, reduces the amount and delays the timing of REM sleep and reduces alertness the following morning. Use of light-emitting devices immediately before bedtime also increases alertness at that time, which may lead users to delay bedtime at home.”
They point out that the use of technology before bedtime is “most prevalent” in children and young adults, and call for further studies on the impact of the light exposure on learning and development.

'Enchanted objects' will kill the internet of things in 2015

Smart objects that blend fashion and our everyday lives will kill off the internet of things in 2015, according to Cedric Hutchings, CEO of Withings. The French company, best known for its smart scales and sensor-packed watches, is now targeting fashion over traditional tech in a bid to expand its business.

Speaking at Le Web 2014 in Paris, Hutchings said the smart devices of the future would be integrated into "dumb" objects we already take for granted: "Wearables need not to be 'dropables'. We have to fix the shortcomings of these devices to appeal to more people," he said.

Examples of such un-droppable, useful objects were given by David Rose, a researcher at MIT's media labs and CEO of Ditto Labs. Rose said that umbrellas that flash a light when rain is forecast and doorbells that ring differently when it is someone you know as opposed to a stranger were examples of what he called "enchanted objects".

Mobile phones in the classroom: teachers share their tips

From multimedia to geocaching, the possibilities for using mobiles to engage learners are endless. Teachers tell Emma Drury how and why they are using the devices in school.

 

Jo Debens, geography teacher, Priory School, Portsmouth

The geography department at my school has been leading the use of mobile device in learning. Throughout last year the mobile@priory charter was created and led by head of department David Rogers and co-constructed by students to enable them to use mobile devices in learning. This was trialled through the geography department and found great success with students becoming more actively engaged with their learning.

Some of the examples of where we use mobile devices range from simply taking photos and videos to share in class or recording homework, to creating revision podcasts or animations. The point often is student choice, encouraging independent learning and allowing students to choose what approach will suit them. We have found that encouraging mobile device use has enabled our students to access resources that we cannot provide otherwise. For example, students access the internet for research (such as the internet or our department blogs/Facebook support page).

On fieldwork, students can record images, video, sound, take notes, use GPS technology and mapping software to record information essential to their coursework. In school we have used mobiles to record work, for example the students used chalk around school to leave messages or symbols regarding social spaces and guerilla messages and then used mobiles to take images or record video or sound interviews of them discussing their work which could then be shared with the class. The focus is on the learning, the discussion on what they gained from the activity not on the device.

One activity sees students investigating secret places in school - they have to find a space, and find evidence or clues about that space to share with others. Many use their mobiles to record sound or image clues to share. We also introduced a geocaching project where students hid Olympic themed geocaches at Box Hill and used mobile devices with GPS to use the geocaching.com website and online research before hiding their geocaches and then seeing them go live and have real people from the public able to find their work.

The benefit for us as teachers is the personalisation, and the freedom for students to access resources. Often the lower ability children find mobile devices enable them to interact more freely and use tools to learn. We find that it encourages student voices and increases engagement.

Teachers launch weather balloons, and a passion for science

A weather-balloon kit helped two teachers inspire their students with custom experiments.

 
Making science, technology, engineering and math into hands-on endeavors can spark interest in these fields and cement concepts learned in the classroom. As science coordinator and a physics teacher at Harrisonburg (Va.) High School, Andy Jackson* was looking for a good, complex hands-on project for sophomores and juniors in the school’s Governor’s STEM Academy. Jackson and the so-director of the STEM academy, Myron Blosser*, came across a hands-on project in May when they visited the National Science Teachers Association STEM Forum and Expo in New Orleans, La.

They ran across a company that offers high altitude weather balloon kits. Made by Stratostar, the kits come with boxes to hold a payload of experiments. Transmitters will send data from the experiments and information about the balloon’s location back to the ground. Jackson and Blosser purchased a package, and two other teachers in the science department, Christina Welsh and Kasey Hovermale headed up the project with their students.

After more than seven weeks of preparation, their students launched their first balloon flight last week. It lofted a 2.7 kilogram (6 pound) payload to 25,908 meters (85,000 feet) and carried it 78 miles west of their launch site. The project gave the students a chance to decide what experiments to send, and to place the cameras and sensors in the payload themselves. The data will be used to design and carry out future flight experiments based on the temperature, sound and humidity data they obtained.

“When we saw this weather balloon idea, we thought ‘This is it,’” Jackson says. “We needed something that would integrate different disciplines. This tied in atmospheric science, chemistry and engineering.”

What they do…

These weather balloons — between 0.7 and 2.4 meters (2.5 to 8 feet) in diameter — work on a fairly simple principle. The balloon is attached to a small payload (less than 5.4 kilograms), filled with helium and released. In short order, it rises into near space, an altitude of between 19,812 and 99,974 meters. As the balloon rises, the atmospheric pressure falls. This causes the helium in the balloon to expand. When the balloon gets high enough, the expanding gas makes it pop. The science payload now falls back to Earth, aided by a small parachute. Meanwhile, the sensors send data on the payload’s location back to the ground, so that teachers can send out search parties to pick it up.

From electric ink to aromapoetry – the physical book is not dead, it’s about to be reborn

"Analogue” and “digital” are the two polar opposites of our modern world. The word “analogue” has become our catch-all term for what we see as slow, one-way and limited in functional possibilities; while “digital” is our synonym for the dynamic, interactive and fluid.

Analogue is old; digital new. Paper has always been the epitome of the analogue: a physical medium which can receive, present and preserve information but otherwise remains static and fixed.

It’s our entrenched understanding of these polarities that are to blame for the well-worn idea that the physical book is dying. This is simply not the case – “analogue” technologies such as ink and paper are now being developed in ways that can and in all likelihood will revolutionise the material, printed book.

Sketching circuits

Conductive inks such as those produced by the British firm Bare Conductive mean that pen and ink can be used to make circuits – and a piece of paper could feasibly become a circuit board, much like that in a computer but infinitely more flexible and versatile.

 

 

This particular company makes a touch board which allows users to create a keyboard using pen, paper and conductive ink. And Tom Metcalfe and Michael Shorter at the University of Dundee have used similar materials to create a pair of paper headphones.

Artists in particular are using conductive inks to create artworks which offer new forms of interactivity. In his Lagoglyphic Sound System, the Brazilian-American artist Eduardo Kac showed how conductive ink could be used for silk-screen printing. As the viewer touches different parts of Kac’s print, different musical sounds are heard.

A cane that can ‘see’

A nifty device clipped onto a blind person’s cane can detect objects in a person’s path,to help navigate trip hazards.

 

Safely navigating from point A to point B can be a particularly difficult challenge for people who are blind. Even when sweeping a long cane back and forth across their path as they’re walking, blind people easily can miss objects that might trigger a tumble. Now, a young inventor has designed an electronic device to notify people of such obstacles.

Among the biggest trip hazards for blind people: objects between 50 centimeters (about 20 inches) to 1 meter (about 39 inches) above the floor. Such knee-high to waist-high objects include coffee tables, bed frames and other such furniture with overhanging edges, notes Raghav Ganesh. A 12-year-old from San Jose, Calif., he attends Joaquin Miller Middle School.

To prevent falls, bruises and maybe worse, Raghav decided to add electronic “eyes” to the red-and-white cane that many blind people use. To identify what’s ahead, cane users typically tap the ground and sweep their stick back and forth. But Raghav’s cane lets people sense objects well beyond a walking stick’s reach. A small computer acts as the device’s brain. It processes information gathered by sensors. Then, it relays signals to a small motor on the cane. The motor vibrates as soon as the cane’s electronic eyes detect a potential obstacle.

One sensor scans the path ahead in infrared wavelengths. These are the same wavelengths used by many TV remote controls. The other sensor uses ultrasonic wavelengths, the frequencies of sound that dogs can hear but people cannot.

Each sensor is about half the size of a postage stamp. Together, the cane’s electronic eyes and brain weigh about 200 grams (7 ounces). They fit in a small box about twice the size of a deck of cards. The small motor that vibrates is about the size of a coin and the weight of a similar-sized kitchen magnet. It fits on the cane’s handle, right where the user grips the cane.

How science saved the Eiffel Tower

Science eventually won over the critics who had wanted the ‘ugly’ structure dismantled.

 

Close your eyes and picture the city of Paris. Now imagine the city without its most famous landmark: the Eiffel Tower.

The unthinkable almost happened.

When French engineer Gustave Eiffel built this tower for the Paris World’s Fair of 1889, it created a sensation. The iron structure contrasted sharply with the historic stone buildings of Paris. What’s more, at 300 meters (984 feet), it became the tallest structure in the world. It dwarfed the previous record holder — the 169.3-meter (555-foot) Washington Monument in the U.S. capital.

Eiffel’s four-legged iron archway was supposed to last only 20 years. That’s when Eiffel’s permit to operate the building would expire and the city could choose to tear it down.

And it initially seemed the building indeed was in peril. Three hundred prominent artists and writers publicly expressed their hatred for Eiffel’s iron giant. In a petition published in the French newspaper Le Temps just as construction was beginning, the group referred to the Tower as a “giddy ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack.”

A French novelist of the time, Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans, declared that “it is hard to imagine” that people will allow such a building to stay.

Yet from the beginning, Eiffel had a strategy to save his building. If the Tower was linked to important research, he reasoned, no one would dare take it down. So he would make it a grand laboratory for science.

Areas of research would include weather and the brand-new fields of powered flight and radio communications. “It will be an observatory and a laboratory such as science has never had at its disposal,” Eiffel bragged in 1889.

And his strategy worked. This year marks the iconic structure’s 125th birthday. Over the years, research conducted there has brought dramatic and unexpected payoffs. During World War I, for instance, the French army used the Tower as a giant ear to intercept radio messages. It even led to the arrest of one of the war’s most famous and notorious spies.

The role of film in schools

If you think film only works for teaching the arts – think again.
Using film in the classroom isn’t a perk reserved for English and drama. Teacher Elizabeth Evans explores how science, geography and maths students can benefit.

 

 
I ventured to the back of the science lab, clipboard and observation sheet in hand. A group of hyperactive year 7 students followed me, high on sugar after lunch. It was the second to last period and I couldn’t help but worry for the newly-qualified teacher (NQT) I was about to observe.

He took the register and tried to settle the class. One threw a paper clip, another put his head on the desk while his friend yawned loudly. Nervously, the teacher spoke: “Everyone focus on the images on the board. As you watch, work out what we are going to be learning about today.” The teacher dimmed the lights and carefully chosen, short but shocking clips from An Inconvenient Truth lit up the classroom. The room fell silent and heads rose from desks. The students had to write down a learning question based on the emotive images they had seen. “All learners now on task and engaged,” I wrote.

Once traditionally associated with subjects such as English and drama, now more subjects are experimenting with film in the classroom, with striking results. In my science observation, students were learning with pace, discussing how the images made them feel. “Sir, it’s like The Day After Tomorrow, only worse,” one student declared. Using his prompt card, the NQT pushed the student to explain what he meant. A rich and varied discussion took place among these usually not-so-confident learners.

An East Midlands-based study exploring the benefits of film in education found 100% of teachers felt film could help reach difficult or challenging students – 80% said it had a significant impact. The NQT’s students were certainly a challenge; set five of six, 70% of the students were classed as pupil premium and over half had statements of educational need, yet all were now on task and making progress. “Because film is so universal,” says Helen Maguire, a teacher at a pupil referral unit (PRU) in Cheshire, “students can relate to the ideas without feeling out of their depth or threatened. Film combines the visual, auditory and kinesthetic with the emotions. It reaches students in a way nothing else can.”

It need not just be Hollywood blockbusters. In a recent geography lesson I observed, a teacher used films made by the students to teach erosion. Weeks earlier, the teacher had dipped into BBC class clips to introduce the topic. Using these clips as models, the students were asked to make their own short films in groups, investigating an area of erosion linked to their forthcoming field trip. Small handheld video cameras on loan from IT were used. No technological wizardry was required, but key stage 4 media studies students were there to help if needed.