I have enjoyed the chance to try out the Raspberry Pi Camera kit and look into the applications for educational use. The kit is a well put together combination of components to get started with photography using the Raspberry Pi.
Unfortunately as I have been off work recovering from an operation I have not been able to put the full plan into action and have only been able to do the home education part of the project. I had planed to also use the Kit with my students at School to use the timelapse photography as a tool for teaching some programming. I have set up a Scheme of Work for the students and I have tested the concepts. I intend to run this scheme of work with a trial group of students when I return to work.
However I have been able to run the project with home educated children and I have also had the chance to try a couple of side projects with the equipment. One using timelapse to record the snow in our garden and the other creating a low cost visualiser for use in my classroom (especially when using the raspberry Pi to teach physical computing) the Visual-Pi-ser.
I have linked all of the blog posts and resources i have created for this project below:
Timelapse Crystals Projects:
Timelapse Crystals Scheme of Work
Side Projects
The Visual-Pi-ser Instructions
Kit Review
Raspberry Pi Model B+ Camera Kit Review
Videos
Testing the equipment
Project results
Future Plans
-Implement the timelapse crystals scheme with my trial group of students.
-Add to the methods of combining the pictures to create a video for the scheme of work (especially AVCONV and mencoder)
-Test the above combining methods on the new Pi 2
-Experiment with FTP updating a live timelapse video that students can view from home
-Experiment with taking photographs under different wavelengths of light
(the last two are suggestions from comments I have not yet had time to explore)
Edit: Since posting this I have discovered that Scratch GPIO now does include support for taking pictures using the Camera module. This could be a good way to use the timelapse photography to teach coding to younger students.