Ayah Bdeir is the founder and lead engineer of littleBits, an open source library of electronic modules that snap together with tiny magnets for prototyping and play. littleBits won Popular Science’s “Best of Toy Fair 2012″ and Ayah was named a TED Fellow this year. I interviewed her this morning at TED2012 in Long Beach, CA.
My friend and former college professor Yury Gitman posted up this time lapse video of him and his business partner Joel Murphy making and packing up 800 pulse sensor kits. Nice!
The Pulse Sensor Kit is a kit. It does contain an assembled PCB Pulse Sensor, but it also has a collection of other supplies that you need to get the most out of the Pulse Sensor: a Velcro strap (to wrap the sensor around your finger with), an ear clip, and vinyl dots (to make the sensor more comfortable and reliable when contacting direct skin). It doesn’t sound like a lot, but using these helps you get good long-term readings. Unless you are a seamstress or jewelry designer, these parts are not exactly effortless to source. We tested a lot of Velcro straps and ear clips before selecting the ones that finally made it in our kit.
Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science is home to some of the most innovative robotics research on the planet, much of it coming out of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab. On Wednesday, Feb. 29, Deputy Dean for Education and GRASP Lab member Vijay Kumar presented some of this groundbreaking work at the TED2012 conference, an international gathering of people and ideas from technology, entertainment, and design. He also debuted a video of the lab’s quadrotors doing something they have never done before…
In early 2012, ice on the Amsterdam canals began breaking up and melting. This presented us with a unique opportunity to raise awareness on the issue of climate change in a way that hadn’t been done before. In prime spots around the city, QR codes were transferred onto the ice which had a link to the WWF Netherlands site and instantly put the issue of climate change in people’s hands. And once the ice started to melt, it was a natural ‘demonstration’ of this problem. There was no media spend, and there are no laws against printing on ice.
NEW PRODUCT – Solder Spool – 1/4 lb SAC305 RoHS lead-free / 0.031 rosin-core [0.25 lb / 100 g]. If you want to make a kit you’ll need some solder. This 1/4 lb (about 110 gram) spool is just the right amount, not too much (like 1 lb spools) and not too little (like those little ‘pocket clip’ vials). This spool of solder is 0.031″ diameter, with the ‘industry standard’ SAC305 RoHS lead-free formulation. For flux, it contains a ‘no clean’ rosin core. Good for all through-hole soldering and some larger SMT soldering (especially when used with wick).
Contains Sn 96.5%, Ag %3.0, Cu %0.5 (96.5/3/0.5)
Perfect for when you need a lead-free alternative to classic 60/40!
Technically oriented person to support a wide variety of X-ray research programs at the Cornell University High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS). Involves designing, building, maintaining, and troubleshooting complex scientific equipment, and providing service and instruction to staff, scientists, and visitors to the facility.
Would you like like to work in a large, fast paced cutting edge research laboratory? Would you like to support research in a wide variety of ways, from training experimenters to high level design and hands on fabrication of complex scientific equipment?
With $66.40 of profit we can’t cover our existing costs like the remaining PCBs ($75), envelopes ($12.60), and warehousing costs ($15). In the end we’re $36 bucks in the hole in this experiment.
A new technique inspired by elegant pop-up books and origami will soon allow clones of robotic insects to be mass-produced by the sheet. Devised by engineers at Harvard, the ingenious layering and folding process enables the rapid fabrication of not just microrobots, but a broad range of electromechanical devices.
In prototypes, 18 layers of carbon fiber, Kapton (a plastic film), titanium, brass, ceramic, and adhesive sheets have been laminated together in a complex, laser-cut design. The structure incorporates flexible hinges that allow the three-dimensional product—just 2.4 millimeters tall—to assemble in one movement, like a pop-up book.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation, creator of the Raspberry Pi ARM-based tiny computer that sells for $25, has announced that it has signed up Premier Farnell and RS Componentsas licensed manufacturers of the devices. The Foundation explained that the new model would remove the limitations of its previous supply model which meant it could only do batches of ten thousand Raspberry Pis a time, and that from now on, the device would be manufactured to meet demand. The Foundation will make a small profit from each Raspberry Pi sale which will be put back into the charity to help it achieve its educational mission.
…Although Raspberry Pi boards are designed with open source software in mind, with a remix of Fedora Linux being developed for it, the boards themselves are not open source hardware. The Foundation hopes to make the board open later on, with a release of the whole design, but is concentrating of building a sustainable educational foundation.
Researchers at Drexel University are bringing the latest technological advancements in 3-D printing to the study of ancient life. Using scale models of real fossils, for the first time, they will be able to test hypotheses about how dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals moved and lived in their environments.
CircuitLab today released a browser-based schematic editor and circuit simulator for the online electronics community. SPICE-like device models and mixed-mode simulation support allows engineers and hobbyists to tackle a wide range of board-level design problems. While most EDA software is Windows-only, CircuitLab is 100% web-based, Windows/Mac/Linux cross-platform, and requires no installation or plug-ins. Instead of today’s typical forum posts with static screenshots from different desktop tools, the online electronics community can now use CircuitLab to share useful URLs (as well as PNGs and PDFs) which link directly to interactive, editable, runnable schematics. In just a few clicks, another designer can open that circuit, make a change, simulate it, and post the new version back to the community.
Well, this is a good opportunity to take a step back and define our acronym. STEM stands for Science Technology Engineering and Math education and has become the go-to term when describing educational efforts in the fields. I enjoyed researching the response to this question because I don’t think its true meaning is very well known and coming up with a clear-cut answer wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.
As described by Thom Markham, Ph. D, an advocate of Project Based Learning, which is one of the root philosophies of the implementation of STEM education:
Most people don’t know the history of STEM education. The term was first coined in the 1890’s by the Committee of Ten at Harvard, as a response to the gaps in the agrarian school system of the 1800’s. STEM described the attributes of a good industrial school system that would raise the standards of excellence for modern students.
To realize the potential of STEM education in the modern era, I think we’ll need deeper thinking than has been evident so far. Here’s the primary problem from my perspective: Succeeding with STEM education in the 21st century requires systemic change at a scale far larger than the Harvard professors had to envision 110 years ago. Without adopting inquiry-based, student-centered, skill-driven approaches to teaching and learning—all nested in a system that values innovation—STEM education will become just another term for additional math and engineering courses.
In addition, there are numerous resources available online that supply both teacher and student resources for educating STEM based topics. The purpose of this content is to help emphasize the importance of skills like critical thinking, problem solving, intellectual curiosity, etc:
On an aside…..my biggest problem with the use of the acronym in todays educational system is the sheer lack of support for Technology Education (the T & often E in STEM). Tech Ed departments are often under staffed, over populated and rely on curriculum that reinforces the stigma of Tech Ed being “shop” class. In the world of education, humanities, mathematics, and science are all driven by state and national standards for the content that is taught. This is a double-edged sword as those teachers do not have a lot of flexibility to bring creativity and new topics into their classroom. The flip side is that they are guaranteed students, as their classes are mandatory for graduation. Tech Ed on the other hand has very few standards, and sometimes none at all. And we are not guaranteed students, as our classes are often not made mandatory for graduation! This again is a double-edged sword as the teacher has all of the freedom in the world to develop and teach new curriculum, but has to fight tooth-and-nail to balance curricular rigor with student enrollment.
It is interesting that even the US Department of Education’s is confused about STEM site has their STEM category is labeled “Science and Math (STEM)”……
Well, I hope this answered your question has at least steered you in the right direction!
Next up is Dr. Ew with a question about making things move with an Arduino!
Don’t forget, everyone is invited to ask a question!
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