We are a young hackerspace (around half a year old) located in Prague, Czech Republic. Experience of our members is wide and varies from electronics, hardware, programming, IT security to medicine and biotechnology. During our relatively short existence we already held lots of events with strong international presence, to mention a few: Mitch Altman's soldering workshop, GNOME Foundation's Python Hackfest or Frantisek Apfelbeck's foodhacking workshop. We also helped with organization of Polish security conference Confidence and you could've also seen us for example at 27C3 presenting our computer driven homemade RGB laser. We are very happy and honored that we can participate in this challenge and we'd like to use this opportunity not only to design and deliver our solution, but also to get more contacts in the global hackerspace community and to strengthen the worldwide cooperation.
The main impulse to join this challenge came from our member Sargon who has big experience with training people as service technicians in his company, so he is able to easily recognize which parts of theoretical knowledge in electronics need more practical experience. He'll also be the main designer of the whole solution. The next team member is STiCK, a software wizard and a huge open-source proponent. His main task will be to create a nice and usable application which will control the whole device. Biiter, a superb low level C hacker, and b00lean, a microcontroller guru, will unite their forces to take care of creating the firmware of ARM microprocessor. During the development we'll be communicating with our friends - teachers - in order to get their feedback and make sure we are not creating some unneeded junk project, but something that will be useful and helpful in education.
The aim of our project is to create an open platform for teaching electronic principles. The target audience are students of elementary and comprehensive schools interested in this field. During their education they gain theoretical knowledge, but this is often unsupported by illustrative experiments and visualizations. Such study is boring and it is harder to remember new pieces of information. On the other hand, we think that "school by play" makes electronics much more attractive to students and also makes it easier to understand its nature.
The main idea is to provide modular design - one "mother board" and a set of "shields" which are used for particular scenarios. One shield can be reused for more lessons and vice-versa one lesson can use more shields if needed. Example shields include:
- basic circuit with battery, wires, switch and lightbulb
- slightly advanced circuit with resistors, coils and capacitors
- advanced circuits with semiconductors such as diodes and transistors
Both hardware and software parts are open source and by using modular design it is even more easier to extend the project (e.g. designing own shields for custom lessons), so in the later phases we could create shields for other fields like for example optics, acoustics, chemistry or biology.
During the first week of our challenge we made first steps in application and firmware development, we agreed on protocol we'll be using between the computer and the mother board and we also scheduled an appointment with the teachers. Needless to say, we are very excited to be a part of the challenge and we're looking forward for the output not only from our hackerspace but also from other hackerspaces all around the world!