Eleven iPad-centric schools to open in the Netherlands

Eleven schools in The Netherlands plan to replace blackboards, schedules and more with iPads. In fact, each student's entire educational career will hinge on Apple's revolutionary tablet device.

Scheduled to open this August, the so-called "Steve Jobs Schools" will host about 1,000 children, aged four to 12. According to Spiegel Online, the curriculum will be largely student-directed. Gone will be typical education tools like lesson plans, schedules, grades and parent-teacher meetings.

The school day will be atypical as well. While each participating school will be open from 7:30 AM to 6:30 PM each workday, students will only be required to attend between 10:30 AM and 3:00 PM. Also, parents will be encouraged to take vacations as it suits their own schedules.

Gertjan Kleinpaste, the principal of a participating school in Rotterdam, understands that the program will be envied by some and reviled by others. It's certainly a bold educational experiment. I'm quite interested to see how this pans out.

Eleven iPad-centric schools to open in the Netherlands originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 02 Jul 2013 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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More info at: Eleven iPad-centric schools to open in the Netherlands

Robotic Machine Vision Software

RoboRealm® is an application for use in computer vision, image analysis, and robotic vision systems. Using an easy point and click interface RoboRealm simplifies vision programming! With an inexpensive USB webcam and the PC you already have you can now add machine vision to your robotic projects! Image and/or video processing can be technically difficult. Home robots are continuously moving towards PC based systems (laptop, netbook, embedded, etc.) that have the power to support complex image processing functions. RoboRealm provides the software needed to get such a system up and running. We've compiled many image processing functions into an easy to use windows based application that you can use with a webcam, TV Tuner, IP Camera, etc. Use RoboRealm to see your robot's environment, process the acquired image, analyze what needs to be done and send the needed signals to your robot's motors, servos, etc.

For example, you can use RoboRealm to track colored objects, navigate with obstacle avoidance, identify fiducials that let your robot know where it is, and much more!

More info at: Robotic Machine Vision Software

How-To: A Quick and Sturdy Wood Box

At some point we're all going to need to build a box. Whether it's to keep a tool safe, or build a project enclosure, knowing how to make a box that's a custom size really comes in handy.

Read the full article on MAKE

More info at: How-To: A Quick and Sturdy Wood Box

Arduino Robot

\$275 from the MakerShed.

With the Arduino Robot, you can learn about electronics, mechanics, and software. It is a tiny computer on wheels. It comes with a number of of project examples you can easily replicate, and it is a powerful robotics platform that you can hack to perform all sorts of tasks. The robot comes with a large number of inputs; two potentiometers, five buttons, a digital compass, five floor sensors, and an SD card reader. It also has a speaker, two motors, and a color screen as outputs. You can control all these sensors and actuators through the Robot library. There are two different boards on the Robot: the Control Board (top) and the Motor Board (bottom). If you're just getting started with electronics and programming, you should work with the Control Board. As you become more experienced, you may want to tinker with the Motor Board.

More info at: Arduino Robot

Arduino - Robot

The Arduino Robot is the first official Arduino on wheels. The robot has two processors, one on each of its two boards. The Motor Board controls the motors, and the Control Board reads sensors and decides how to operate. Each of the boards is a full Arduino board programmable using the Arduino IDE. Both Motor and Control boards are microcontroller boards based on the ATmega32u4 (datasheet). The Robot has many of its pins mapped to on-board sensors and actuators. Programming the robot is similar to the process with the Arduino Leonardo. Both processors have built-in USB communication, eliminating the need for a secondary processor. This allows the Robot to appear to a connected computer as a virtual (CDC) serial / COM port. As always with Arduino, every element of the platform – hardware, software and documentation – is freely available and open-source. This means you can learn exactly how it's made and use its design as the starting point for your own robots. The Arduino Robot is the result of the collective effort from an international team looking at how science can be made fun to learn. Arduino is now on wheels, come ride with us!

More info at: Arduino - Robot

MAKE | Introducing New Column from Arduino’s Massimo Banzi

Ask any maker what the hottest subjects are in DIY electronics these days, and odds are the first answer will be Arduino. Since the earliest boards were built in 2005 to enable students to run interactive design projects with open-source tools, the platform has become a world-wide phenomenon, igniting the imaginations of makers, hackers, and artists all over. Simply speaking, Arduino is huge in the maker and MAKE communities. Here’s a great interview Dale Dougherty conducted with Arduino co-founder Massimo Banzi from MAKE Vol. 32.

Today we are thrilled to announce Massimo will be writing a monthly column for MAKE, which we’re calling “MAKE the Future with Arduino.” On the first Tuesday of each month, Massimo will share his unique perspective on the Arduino platform, including insight on the development of the boards, new products, and exciting projects for Arduino fans to share and adapt. Indeed, today’s first column is a preview of an exciting new Arduino product that will be unveiled to the world at Maker Faire Bay Area this week—the Arduino Robot.

So, please join us in welcoming Massimo to MAKE!

More info at: MAKE | Introducing New Column from Arduino’s Massimo Banzi

Sparki - The Easy Robot for Everyone! by ArcBotics — Kickstarter

Easy, affordable, feature packed Arduino robot. Comes w/ sensors motors and more. Great intro to programming/electronics/robots

New: Drag-and-Drop

We're partnering with MiniBloq to bring Drag-and-Drop programming to Sparki! Easy robot programming, bringing the age range down to elementary, and opens robotics to whole new group of future roboticists.

More info at: Sparki - The Easy Robot for Everyone! by ArcBotics — Kickstarter

RoboBrrd : Your DIY Educational Robotic Pet!

Another cool robot from RobotGrrl.

Buddy 4000 Your Fun Robot!

A classy robot chassis designed to express robot emotions with an artistic flair

More info at: RoboBrrd : Your DIY Educational Robotic Pet!

Site of J. Edgar Park

A cool video of some awesome robots by Jack Conte.

More info at: Site of J. Edgar Park

#adafruit6secs - The Adafruit 6 second electronics film festival

The Adafruit 6 second electronics film festival! #adafruit6secs

Call For Entries: Announcing The Adafruit 6 second electronics film festival! Share your cool project in 6 seconds of video and win up to \$600 at the Adafruit store, with six runners up winning \$60 store credit each. In a 6 second video, we want you to share the best project you've made.  Be sure not to use any copyrighted music, video, etc.  This should be all your project, all by you. The Adafruit team will be looking on Twitter, G+/youtube and beyond for Vines, 6 second videos and more tagged with #adafruit6secs. The deadline is 6pm ET, 5/6/13. The Adafruit team of judges will pick their favorites and announce the winner on May, 12th at 6pm ET.

tl;dr - Post a 6 second video of your electronic project(s) using Vine on Twitter and tag it #adafruit6secs !

Keep reading for all the details!

More info at: #adafruit6secs - The Adafruit 6 second electronics film festival

Lego's Mindstorms EV3 programmable robots have character - YouTube

The next generation of Lego's programmable robotics kit is teaches kids how to program, but also offers something for adult enthusiasts.

More info at: Lego's Mindstorms EV3 programmable robots have character - YouTube

HowStuffWorks "How Robots Work"

On the most basic level, human beings are made up of five major components:

A body structure
A muscle system to move the body structure 
A sensory system that receives information about the body and the surrounding environment
A power source to activate the muscles and sensors
A brain system that processes sensory information and tells the muscles what to do

Why your 8-year-old should be coding | VentureBeat

April 12, 2013 9:01 AM Jolie O'Dell

Learn-to-code startups abound these days, but one in particular is focusing on the very young and is having some success in elementary schools around the country — even underserved schools with no budgets for STEM but a great need for better tools.

[The startup is ]{style="font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"}Tynker[; it makes a ]{style="font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"}web-based learning platform and a visual programming language[ for teachers and kids in K-12 classrooms. In a discussion with its co-founder, we found out why ]{style="font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"}[[teaching ]{.kLink style="outline: none medium; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1px !important; border-top-width: 0px !important; border-right-width: 0px !important; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-left-width: 0px !important; border-top-style: none !important; border-right-style: none !important; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: none !important; font-size: inherit !important; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: none; background-color: transparent; width: auto !important; float: none !important; display: inline !important; font-family: inherit !important; position: static;"}[kids]{.kLink style="outline: none medium; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1px !important; border-top-width: 0px !important; border-right-width: 0px !important; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-left-width: 0px !important; border-top-style: none !important; border-right-style: none !important; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: none !important; font-size: inherit !important; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: none; background-color: transparent; width: auto !important; float: none !important; display: inline !important; font-family: inherit !important; position: static;"}]{style="outline: none medium; font-family: inherit !important; font-size: inherit !important; position: static; color: #1f81e5;"}[ how to code is so important to him.]{style="font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"}[

]{style="outline: none medium; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; line-height: 20px; text-align: left;"}

Welcome to the new home of d11.me. I have moved the Url to robotcraft.org and hopefully everything has transferred successfully. You will need to reregister to make a new comment and you will need to update the RSS feeds. Thanks for putting up with the confusion.

Doug

The world just keeps on changing. Never bet against it.

Fraser Speirs - Blog - Teaching Programming with iOS and Amazon EC2

I just shut down the Amazon EC2 instance we've been using all school year, so I thought it was worth reflecting on. Last August, I wrote about my new approach to teaching Ruby programming on our iPads.

How did it work? In a word: perfectly.

When Did Intelligent Life Emerge in the Universe? » A Curious Mind

Figure 1. The Helix Nebula; the gaseous outer layers expelled by a dying star. The ejected material enriches the interstellar medium (from which new stars and planets form) with carbon. Credit: NASA, ESA, C. R. O’Dell (Vanderbilt University), M. Meixner and P. McCullough (STScI).

Observations from the ground and with the Hubble Space Telescope have shown that the cosmic rate of birth of new stars reached its peak some 9–10 billion years ago, and it has been declining ever since.  The peak in the universal rate of carbon production lags behind the cosmic star-formation rate by no more than about a billion years.  Consequently, we can guess that if the universe did indeed experience a burst of life-formation, similar perhaps (in terms of its eruptive nature) to the Cambrian explosion on Earth, the earliest this might have happened was about 9 billion years ago.

It took life on Earth about three billion years to develop from primitive to complex.  We have no idea if this is “typical,” but it seems reasonable to assume that if “intelligent” life develops at all, this process should take a few billion years, given the rather slow pace of Darwinian-like evolution.  This means that we might expect “intelligent” (more cautiously, “complex”) life forms to have emerged in abundance in the universe some 5–6 billion years ago.  If true, then there could be quite a few civilizations out there that are more advanced than ours by a few billions of years.  How is that for a humbling thought?

LEGO.com MINDSTORMS : News

Announcing LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 04/01/2013 Coming Fall 2013: LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Create and command robots that do what you want.

With LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 you can turn your LEGO creations into live robots that follow your every command. The new LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 set includes everything you need – motors, sensors, programmable brick, 550+ LEGO Technic elements, remote control – to create and command robots of even your wildest imagination, including 5 cool robot characters. Download the 3D building instructions and the app to command your robot via your smart device. Then program your robots to walk, talk, move and do whatever you want them to do to via the intuitive software program, the programmable brick or your smart device.

Jobs made Apple exciting, now it's just a company. Journalists are bored.

Now we are getting somewhere. This is really cool.

Dynamic Robot Manipulation – Brick throwing robot « adafruit industries blog

BigDog handles heavy objects. The goal is to use the strength of the legs and torso to help power motions of the arm. This sort of dynamic, whole-body approach is routinely used by human athletes and animals, and will enhance the performance of advanced robots. The control techniques and actuators needed for dynamic manipulation are being developed by Boston Dynamics with funding from the Army Research Laboratory’s RCTA program.

The ultimate robot!

Oreo Separator Machine #1 « adafruit industries blog

A detailed look into the complex world of Oreo separation- featuring music by my band, Anamanaguchi

Cool new way to program the NXT. Will have to follow this to see how it turns out...

Enchanting : Enchanting : Enchanting

What is Enchanting?

Enchanting is a tool to allow children an easy-to-understand way to program LEGO MINDSTORMS NXTrobots. It is based on Scratchand BYOB/Snap!, and powered by leJOS NXJ(Java for the NXT). Enchanting is free and open-source.

For more details, see the About page. Is it any good?

Yes! But, don't take my word for it. See what people are saying about Enchanting.

How do I use it?

Try out our brand new Enchanting Cards! (Here is a preliminary German translation.)

Your other best resource at this time, aside from diving in and trying it out, is the interactive book Robotics with Enchanting and LEGO® NXT: A Project Based Introduction to Programming, available for the iPad or as an interactive PDF for use on your computer. (Please note that we've re-arranged the order of the palettes and changes the 'motor' blocks' colour from red to cyan).

Knowing how to use Scratchis certainly helpful, and, for the advanced user, look at how to use BYOB/Snap, especially the BYOB manual.

I just backed a Kickstarter project!

Next Generation LiveCode (Open Source) by RunRev Ltd — Kickstarter

LiveCode is like a next generation version of HyperCard. It is used to create #1 one app store apps, real-time flight booking systems and control satellites. It is used to create simple one off apps and utilities to solve day-to-day problems.

There are some things it can’t do – yet. This project is to create a next-generation LiveCode.

Our vision is that this new next-generation LiveCode will be free and open source.

It will run on every popular platform and device.

It will let you write programs in English.

And by being open, its English language programming will be extensible to any computing problem out there. That's a world first.

If you couldn’t code before, LiveCode is the answer. If you’ve used the existing version of LiveCode before and it didn’t do everything you needed, this next-generation version has you covered.

Can't wait to see Mark Frauenfelder at the science museum next week!

Celebrity Lecture Series | Fort Worth Museum of Science and History

February 28, 2013 Mark Frauenfelder The Maker Movement – 7 pm Adult \$12 Children (2-12)/Senior (65+) \$10.00

Mark Frauenfelder is the editor-in-chief of Make magazine, the leading publication of the do-it-yourself movement, and the founder of the popular Boing Boing blog, which has over five million unique visitors per month. He is the former editor-in-chief of Wired online, and was an editor at Wired magazine and Wired Books from 1993-1998. He has appeared on The Colbert Report and The Martha Stewart Show, and has written for New York Times Magazine, Popular Science, Business Week, The Hollywood Reporter, Wired and other national publications.

Hans 555 Timer IC - Circuit Playground Plushie ID: 1022 - \$9.95 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits

Hans is the 'old man' of the group. He tends to be nervous and is often indecisive. Hans frequently changes his mind, and is a little fidgety (he oscillates) when he's not moving around. He is very meticulous and precise in other ways; Hans does not like to compromise, preferring to be in a steady state until a dramatic change is called for. Hans speaks with the voice of a kindly old man with a Swiss-German accent, though his voice can become more nasally when he's upset or feels strongly about something. His catchphrase is "maybe so, but perhaps not."

About the 555: The 555 timer IC was designed by Hans Camenzind in 1971. It consists of two threshold triggers, an RS flip-flop, and an output buffer. The 555 provides an easy, reliable way to create rectangular waveforms of adjustable pulse width and frequency by using different external component values.

Review: Marware Axis and MicroShell Folio iPad mini cases | 9to5Mac

Marware, one of the leading accessory makers for Apple’s mobile devices, has sent us two of their latest iPad mini cases for review. Both cases are unique in their own right, but both are built with versatility and quality materials. Check our reviews of both the Marware Axis and Marware MicroShell Folio cases for the iPad mini below.