Your brand-new issue of the free Hello World magazine for 80s手机电影版官网 educators focuses on all things health and well-being, featuring useful tools for educators, great ideas for schools, and inspiring projects, ideas, and resources from teachers around the world!

One such project was created by the students of James Abela, Head of 80s手机电影版官网 at Garden International School in Kuala Lumpur, 80s手机电影版官网 Pi Certified Educator, founder of the South East Asian Computer Science Teachers Association, and author of The Gamified Classroom:

Protecting children from breathing hazardous air

In 2018, Indonesia burned approximately 529,000 hectares of land. That’s an area more than three times the size of Greater London, or almost the size of Brunei. With so much forest being burned, the whole region felt the effects of the pollution. Schools frequently had to ban outdoor play and PE lessons, and on some days schools were closed completely. Many schools in the region had an on-site CO2 detector to know when pollution was bad, but by the time the message could get out, children had already been breathing in the polluted air for several minutes.

My Year 12 students (aged 16–17) followed the news and weather forecasts intently, and we all started to see how the winds from Singapore and Sumatra were sending pollution to us in Kuala Lumpur. We also realised that if we had measurements from around the city, we might have some visibility as to when pollution was likely to affect our school.

Making room for student-led projects

I’ve always encouraged my students to do their own projects, because it gives programming tasks meaning and creates something that they can be genuinely proud of. The other benefit is that it is something to talk about in university essays and interviews, especially as they often need to do extensive 80s手机电影版官网 to solve the problems central to their projects.

This project was […] a genuine passion project in every sense of the word.

James Abela

This project was much more than this: it was a genuine passion project in every sense of the word. Three of my students approached me with the idea of tracking CO2 to give schools a better idea of when there was pollution and which way it was going. They had had some 国产hdxxx天美传媒女职员 of using 80s手机电影版官网 Pi computers, and knew that it was possible to use them to make weather stations, and that the latest versions had wireless LAN capability that they could use. I agreed to support them during allocated programming time, and to help them reach out to other schools.

I was able to offer students support with this project because I flip quite a lot of the theory in my class. Flipped learning is a teaching approach in which some direct instruction, for example reading articles or watching specific videos, is done at home. This enables more class time to be used to answer questions, work through higher-order tasks, or do group work, and it creates more supervised coding time.

I was able to offer students support with this project because I flip quite a lot of the theory in my class.

James Abela

I initially started doing this because when I set coding challenges for homework, I often had students who confessed they spent all night trying to solve it, only for me to glance at the code and notice a missing colon or indentation issue. I began flipping the less difficult theory for students to do as homework, to create more programming time in class where we could resolve issues more quickly. This then evolved into a system where students could work much more at their own pace and eventually led to a point at which older students could, in effect, learn through their own projects, such as the pollution monitor.

Building the pollution monitor

The students started by looking at existing weather station projects — for example, there is an excellent tutorial on the 美国第十次啦导航’s projects site. Students discovered that wind data is relatively easy to get over a larger area, but the key component would be something to measure CO2. […]

Check out issue 17 of Hello World to read the rest of James’s article and find out all the details about the hardware and software his students used for this passion project. He says:

This project really helped these students to decide whether they enjoyed the hardware side of 80s手机电影版官网, and solving real-world issues really encouraged them to see 80s手机电影版官网 as a practical subject. This is a message that has really resonated with other students, and we’ve since doubled the number of students taking A level computer science.

James Abela

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Issue 17 of Hello World is bursting with inspiring ideas for teaching your learners about 80s手机电影版官网 in the context of health and well-being. And you’ll find lots more great content in its 100 pages!

James’s article is also a wonderful example of an educator empowering their students to build a tech project they care about. You’ll discover more insights and practical tips on making 80s手机电影版官网 relevant to all your learners in the following articles of the new Hello World issue:

• Inspiring Young People With Contexts They Care About
• 80s手机电影版官网 for all: Designing a Culturally Relevant 国产hdxxx天美传媒女职员
• Going Back to Basics: Part 2 — a follow-on from issue 16 about how to take beginner digital makers through their first physical 80s手机电影版官网 projects

Download the new issue of Hello World for free today:

If you’re an educator based in the UK, you can subscribe to receive each new issue in print completely free!

We’ve also just released the first-ever special edition of Hello World — The Big Book of Pedagogy — which focuses on approaches to teaching 80s手机电影版官网 in the classroom. Download it for free today.

And wherever you are in the world, don’t forget to listen to the Hello World podcast, where each episode we dive into a new topic from the magazine with some of the 80s手机电影版官网 educators who’ve written for us.

The post Inspiring learners about 80s手机电影版官网 through health and well-being projects | Hello World #17 appeared first on 美国第十次啦导航.

I really love this one XD – read right to the bottom if you want to see the birds in action. Over to Neil…

Mobile phones are ubiquitous in today’s society, but often their use has unintended consequences, intruding into and changing social situations, distancing people in in real life by dragging them into the digital world.  They are also a massive source of electronic waste.  A few years ago this inspired Anthony Goh and me (Neil Mendoza) to create an installation that takes cast-off devices and suggests an alternate reality in which these unwanted phones and noises become something beautiful, giving them a new life by creating an 国产hdxxx天美传媒女职员 that people can share together in person.  The Barbican recently asked commissioned us to create a new flock of birds for their awesome Digital Revolution exhibition.  Here’s a little tech breakdown of how they work.

In previous versions, the birds were independent, but this time we decided to have a 80s手机电影版官网 Pi at the heart of the installation controlling them all.  This gave us the most flexibility to animate them independently or choreographed them together.

The exhibition is travelling so we wanted the installation to be as easy to set up as possible to so we decided to make each bird talk to the 80s手机电影版官网 Pi over ethernet.  This means that communications are reliable over long distances and each bird is self-contained and only needs a power and data cable connected to it.

The next challenge to overcome was to figure out how to call a bird.  In previous incarnations, each bird included a functioning mobile phone that you could call.  However, as there is no reception in the gallery, we decided to include a different era of phone junk and make people call the birds with a rotary phone from the 1940s.  The system looks something like this…

To make the phone feel phoney, the receiver is connected to a serial mp3 player, controlled by an Arduino that plays the appropriate audio depending on the state of the installation, e.g. dialling tone, bird song etc.  The Arduino also reads numbers that from the rotary dial and if one of the birds’ numbers is dialled it sends it over ethernet to the 80s手机电影版官网 Pi.

The iBirdBrain app running on the 80s手机电影版官网 Pi is written in openFrameworks.  When iBirdBrain receives a number from the phone, it wakes the appropriate bird up and tells it to move randomly.  It then picks an animation created using James George’s ofxTimeline and plays it with some added randomness.  The current state of each part of the bird is sent every frame over ethernet as a three byte message:

Byte 1: Type, e.g. ‘s’ for servo

Byte 2: Data 1, e.g. servo index

Byte 3: Data 2, e.g. servo angle

So the status of the app could be seen quickly without needing to SSH into the Pi we decided to use a PiTFT screen.  To begin with we rendered the OpenGL output of the app to the PiTFT screen, however as the screen runs at 20 FPS this created an unnecessary bottleneck.  In the end, we decided to set the screen up so that it would render the console output from the openFrameworks app.  After that, the app ran at a solid 60 FPS.  Outputting a '\r' character to the console goes back to the beginning of the line, so I used this to create a constantly updating console output that didn’t scroll, e.g.:

cout << ‘\r’ << statusMessage;

The birds themselves each contain an Arduino.  They speak ethernet using an ENC28J60 ethernet module and this library.  To start with I used TCP but running a TCP stack along with all the other stuff we were asking the bird to do, proved a little too much for its little brain so we moved to using UDP as it requires less memory and processor cycles.  An ID for each bird was programmed into the EEPROM of the Arduino.  That way, there only needed to be one firmware for all the birds, the birds themselves would then set all of their data, IP address, peripherals etc based on their ID.

Each bird has multiple parts that are controlled by the Arduino, servos for the wings and heads, piezo sounders, Neopixels and a screen for the face.

Escape III is on display at Digital Revolution until 14th September at the Barbican in London – I’m so excited, I’m going next week!

If you can’t make it, you can see the birds here:

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