Exciting times in ICT as its interconnections with other school subjects become clearer and as we build new areas to our curriculum. And some of that really does involve building.
This is a video made by my colleague, Olly Rokison, of his working Tower Bridge model. Both model and video are being used this year in our ICT course for our 13 year-olds as we explore how things are now talking to us.
From our school website (where the full, annotated Arduino code can be downloaded):
At St Paul's, we take a steady interest in new and emerging technologies. We have been experimenting recently with the open source Arduino hardware.
In this project, Oliver Rokison, Technology, ICT and Computing teacher, built a working paper model of Tower Bridge, connected it via Arduino gear to the Tower Bridge Twitter account — and the result is a model that mimics the movements of the real bridge.
The Tower Bridge Twitter account was, of course, set up by Tom Armitage. Tom wrote about putting Tower Bridge on Twitter in February, 2008, in Making Bridges Talk:
I’ve written before about how wonderful Twitter can be as a messaging bus for physical objects. The idea of overhearing machines talking about what they’re doing is, to my mind, quite delightful.
