It was a packed semester with students working on three distinctly different electronic projects. This year's Device Invention class started with the creation of a device that speaks, or is communicated with, wirelessly. Students were encouraged to think of wireless technology as a modern form of magic that allows an invisible stream of information pass short or long distances. Here are a few of the projects:
Max's Lunar Clock connects to a weather api to represent the current moon cycle.
Lois's Internet-controlled tea infuser. The steep time can be adjusted via a web app.
Kapp's martian weather monitor used NASA's mars rover API to get the current conditions.
Sydney and Leo made an internet connected mirror that gives you the time, weather, NYT top stories and upcoming muni buses.
Nichole's project uses an LED ring and the international space station API to indicate when the space station is within the latitude and longitude of the Bay Area.
The second project asked students to collect and visualize data. The goal was to think about what data could be collected and then presented in a way that tells a hidden story. What can we see in the data that we could not see before? Some examples:
Pauline, Kelby and Nichole's interactive visualization showing people entering the school over the course the day.
Isaac, Matt and Erik visualize current over time from different custom made batteries. Each of the three circles represents a different amount of weight placed on top of the aluminium-graphite batteries, as determined by the width of the circles' diameter. The lines that go outwards represent the current output over time. To read time, start from the the top and go clockwise just as if you were telling time on a standard analog clock.
Luca and Harrison visualize the temperature variation across neighborhoods.
The final short project was to design a portable solar device. The device could be a light, portable charger, or something else that can be run on 2 to 5 watts of solar generated energy. An couple examples:
Kelby's 2-watt portable solar battery pack with USB charging ability.
Ellie's 3.5-watt portable solar battery pack with USB charging ability.