Robots and things
As the internet of things makes its presence felt ever more keenly in our lives, we’re continuing to respond with exciting developments at school.
Two years ago, Oliver Rokison, Engineering and Technology, ICT and Computing teacher, built a paper model of Tower Bridge, connected it via Arduino gear to Tom Armitage’s Tower Bridge Twitter account — and had a miniature, working version of the real bridge. A robot, if not quite like those Karel Čapek imagined.
This year, our newly formed Robosoc kicked off the term by deploying some Nanodes, ‘an open source Arduino-like board that has in-built web connectivity … a low cost platform for creative development of web connected ideas’. Tinkering and making will both define many people’s experience of the internet of things and prove to be very important to its development. Russell Davies spoke about this recently on Radio 4.
We teach about the internet of things in our Fourth form (Year 9) ICT course, believing it important that teenagers understand what it means that devices connected to the internet will soon be very common (ubicomp).
It’s in developments such as these that engineering, systems and control, coding and ICT all meet. Find out more about our work by following Oliver Rokison’s Arduino in School blog and Robosoc’s own blog.
