Academic Marginalia

I recently had an opportunity to share my STEM Journey with students who attended the Stemettes Monster Confidence event at CDW in Peterborough.  The slides below are from my talk, which highlights how my interest in computing and electronics, and a sustained curiosity that has led me to a career in academia. My STEM Journey - Arosha K. Bandara   from  Arosha Bandara

Tools for making sure that "Sparks will Fly" This year's Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, titled " Sparks will Fly " were all about 'hacking' everyday objects to make them part of the Internet of Everything.  Presented by Prof. Danielle George from University of Manchester, they were a great showcase of how engineers tackle challenging problems by extending the capabilities of technologies like the light bulb, the telephone and the motor. Across the three lectures, the audience got to take part in building systems that used internet connected lights to play Tetris on a London skyscraper, to holographic communications and a robotic orchestra.  Through this process, we understood how to build solutions to complex problems by: decomposing them into simpler sub-problems; identifying technologies that could help us solve the sub-problems, using techniques like abstraction and  analogical reasoning ; building prototypes to test our hypotheses...

Fragment of Sense script that updates and reads a Xively feed Recently I have been working on getting the Sense platform to work with xively - a cloud service for sharing data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices.  This has been in the context of a project funded by the UK's Technology Strategy Board, called DISTANCE: Demonstrating the Internet of School Things – A National Collaborative Experience . The project will use a number of different IoT devices, from scientific data loggers, air quality monitors, weather stations and the OU's Sense board to demonstrate how learning can be enhanced by IoT technologies.  Working with schools across the UK, we installing these devices in class rooms, playgrounds (really, wherever the students / teachers want) and making the data streams they generate available a xively feeds.  This allows the schools to use each others' data in ways that allows students to carry out experiments using real data gathered from sites a...

Screenshot of a completed CodeClub 'Whack-a-Witch' project The second session of CodeClub at St. Berndette's Primary School in Milton Keynes took place yesterday. We managed to sort out most of the technical problems so things got started a lot quicker this time.  As planned, the children spent the first half of the session finishing off their 'Felix and Herbert' games, with those that finished early helping their friends.  There was also a lot of 'tweaking' going on to the scoring code, sprite costumes and sounds - which was great because it made the children really feel that they'd created their own personal version of the game. Once everyone had completed the first project, we moved on to the next worksheet - the 'Whack-a-Witch' project.  This time I just handed out the worksheets and let them go at it.  Now that they were familiar with the Scratch interface and got the hang of using the colours to help them find different program blo...

CodeClub materials prepared for Session 1 I delivered my first session of CodeClub yesterday at St. Bernadette's Catholic Primary School in Monkston Park.  We took a while to get started properly while some technical issues with laptops not being fully charged or user accounts not working were getting sorted out.  We used the time to get everyone signed up to the club with a nice name badge.  There are 15 children in total (8 boys, 7 girls) and a few of them had done some little bits of programming before (e.g., scripting animations and games similar to CargoBot). I didn't hand out the worksheets right at the beginning because I wanted to do some step-by-step walkthroughs to get the kids familiar with the Scratch environment.  However, it was apparent that the children were really excited about getting to program their own game and impatient to get started.  So once they'd figured out the basics of putting blocks together, we handed out the worksheets an...

SenseHub - Nesta Digital Makers Call from Arosha Bandara on Vimeo . Some time ago, I helped put together a proposal to the Nesta Digital Makers Fund to create a online community portal that would help young digital makers to learn about, collaborate on and share Internet of Things prototypes, that were built using the Open University's Sense Kit . The video above was part of this proposal and last week we got the exciting news that we have been shortlisted to come and pitch our idea in person to the selection panel.  This call for proposals attracted a whole collection of really interesting ideas and it is really great to have our idea selected for the next round of the process.  Pitch day is in a week's time and hopefully I'll have further good news to write about the SenseHub very soon!

Code Club Assembly Presentation from akbandara As part of my work with STEMnet, I recently signed up as a CodeClub volunteer at St. Bernadette's Catholic Primary School in Milton Keynes.  Working with Kate Clarke, the ICT leader at the school, I am going to be leading an after-school club that will introduce kids in Year 5 and Year 6 to the exciting world of programming.  CodeClub is a nationwide, volunteer driven, grass-roots movement to get kids learning about the fun that can be had programming computers, rather than simply using them. In order to give the kids some idea about what they might be letting themselves in for, last week I delivered the short presentation (embedded above) at the school.  I started out by getting the kids to identify different computers, and think about what a computer really does, i.e. follows a set of instructions to complete a task.  We then played with a neat little iPad game called 'Kodable' which allows the player t...

I am really excited to be registered as a STEM Ambassador. I was prompted to do this after the experience of running a hands-on programming workshop for school kids back in April and I am looking forward to doing similar activities in the future. Check my STEMnet profile page for more details:  http://networking.stemnet.org.uk/users/142113