Wednesday 13 March 2013

DronePhone

So there I was, thinking out loud with my mate at Makerspace, RichardR about what you could do with a Parrot AR.Drone that might teach kids something.  The brief was brief (aren't all the best ones?) - we need to have a more 'active' computer science activity to engage our knowledge hungry local cub scouts, as they love running around and doing things.  We've got a Parrot AR.Drone (The BananaDrone) and another on the way, and we've all got phones.  We want to get a GPS chip for the Drone, so what about if the cubs went outside to the big field behind their scout hut (also home of Makerspace), plotted some kind of route on their phones, upload it somehow to the Drone which will then follow the route. After all, all cubs love a bit of pathfinding!

The missing link is the thing that transfers the route from the phone to Drone, but that can't be hard can it? Between myself, the cubs and the makerspace folk, we should be able to do it in an evening I reckon.

Activities like these are great for kids because it teaches them how you'd program a device (you create the program by walking around, and the program needs to make sense at the very least), and then install that program into the memory of the thing that then runs the program.  There is a bit of a challenge to it, and some anxiousness as you watch it act out your instructions.  it's like BigTrak, but flying and very much in the 21st Century, using the latest technology.

Once the cubs (or other kids) have done the routing and flying bit, we can sit down and show them how the simple program that transfers the instructions between the devices works, and hopefully teach them a bit of programming along the way.  If you've got some less technically-inspired kids, then the fact this is a physical and fun activity should still engage them with the task.

The above concept and the BananaDrone is very much the approach I think you need to take to teach kids computer science in the 'teenies' - it's fun, realtime, technically bang up to date and it has that tiny bit of danger/doubt that all good hacking should have...

We'll get some code up once it's written ;-)

(Oh, and when I get my AR.Drone GPS module - hopefully I'll get one very soon)


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