Electronics and Computer Science Outreach

Today I was able to give a small talk with Michael Butler to the Industrial Liaison Committee. I spoke about the outreach we were doing. It was nice to see how much debate it raised . The main consensus was that this is not just an ECS problem but a Russell Group problem. This is some that we need need to think about and I have some thoughts. So watch this space…

On Monday 17^th March I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the ICT Conference 2014 at King Edwards School. The aim of the conference was to bring together various schools in order to discuss ICT in schools, ICT facilities and issues in ‘bring your own devices’. There was a huge interest in iPads in schools and apps to help with making home work fun and making school life easier. I think I misunderstood the brief of the conference and did a presentation of the ‘alternative computing curriculum’.  Looking at where we predict future graduates to be. So in 10 years time prospective UGs are going to be coming in with a different skills set so this session was to discuss with teachers the future university applicant. This was a fabulous session and I was honored to be invited to talk.

On 15th March, as well as Erica we also had our wonderful Nano Lab lead by Dr Asa Asadollahbaik. This was a popular activity as it was interactive and had activities which would not normally take place in the classroom. A write up of the activity from Asa follows:

We had lab coveralls and lab glasses for kids to were and understand about cleanliness of nanolabs. There was a great enthusiasm among people to get into the lab coveralls and take photos of themselves. The best was a dad who had 3little kids, all younger than 6 year old and he made sure all of them get into lab coveralls and come and watch what we were doing.

We had great amount of surprise when we explain to them that 100nm is a very small dot in your hair. “Wow, that’s tiny”  was a very much regular reaction we got from kids and their parents. Another point of excitement for the kids was when during the exposure, UV light shining onto the resist throught the mask. Most of the people draw their own masks to print to the resist. When the exposure was done and we took the substrate out of the yellow box, they were very surprise to see that the pattern was transferred into the blue resist.

During the exposure we also got a lot of surprised faces, eventhough it didn’t work out perfectly well due to a lot of UV exposure from the lightning in the area. This little on in the picture was very surprised to see glass at the bottom and she asked me “so did it become glass!?”.

And of course they all loved to look into microscopes and see what we can really make! They were very much amazed with the different colours coming from diffraction grating effect from one of the wafers. One of them told me that the chip with metal contacts pointing inwards looks like a star!

The best section was probably the application stage, were they were looking into microscopes and could hear about applications and where the chips are used for. In overall we managed to talk to around 300 people, including parents and kids. But unfortunately because of the nature of the activity there were times that we had to tell people to go and come back again as we didn’t have enough space to have them in. It was great to see so many people coming into the NanoLab and keen to were coveralls and get their hands dirty. Some even asked for the substrate glass to take it away. And hey, why not! 😉

We had a little two year old yesterday who was absolutely amazed with Erica. His family came to the Big Bang for two days. Apparently last night he spent a chunk of time talking in his sleep about Erica he ways saying ‘Erica come back’ quite a lot. He has been back for a second look today and was just as enthusiastic… I think we have our first super fan!

I had to ask for a definition of what trumping meant (it means fart!) but this has been something that has kept many people amused for the 4 days! Its really nice to see faces of young people when they are amazed at the electronics inside Erica and telling people about the work thats gone into her. We are enjoying showing her off and telling people what the university of Southampton is up to. I am blogging early as I am at a conference tomorrow and we have to pack down the stand in two hours so there is alot to do! We are exhausted but I will be very happy when we get back tonight and she is back at her home safe and sound! She will be at the science fair at Southampton next week. I will be putting up a lot of photos in the next couple days so keep an eye out for those!

The best thing about doing events is the great randomness of questions. The question above was amazing and refreshing. It was asked by a 4 year old girl who was excited at seeing a ‘wild animal!’. The response has been amazing. There are a steady flow today as it’s a family day. The twitter feature has been very popular today. I will be putting up some photos in the next couple days. We have been trying to get the attention of Raspberry Pi whilst we have been here and any other organisations who might be interested. We are having losts of fun but its very tiring!

Today we had Erica, as well as Studend robotics on the stand. Tyler was with student robotics and I stayed with Erica.  I stopped counting at 550 people, which was at lunch time. Today I focused on the social media side of Erica. I decided to start tweeting about Erica this morning and as soon as I did the Big Bang community officer turned up to get more information about Erica. This was a trend, whenever we tweeted, someone came over to see Erica especially. A very popular last minute feature was the increase in farting. The effect of Erica farting is something the kids loved. It made them understand the brain a lot more , So we decided to make her fart a lot more frequently. This meant if a pupil was a younger age I could set them a ‘make the rhino fart’ challenge. This meant that I could explain to the teacher how the rhino worked and it mean that the child understood that ‘if rhino is full then it will fart’. One teacher said they were going to use the rhino as part of their next scratch lesson when they teach about if functiona and use the rhino as an example. Today was also great because of student robotics: They had great activities which featured raspberry pis and they taught younger pupils how to program and got them using robots to solve challenges. Really excited about tomorrow! Bring it on!

Today was an exciting day! Tyler and I got to the NEC early in the morning to make sure that our Erica stand looked presentable and to take the bubblewrap off Erica. There was enough bubble wrap to fill the space we were allocated! Luckily setting up Erica did not cause any problems. As we were setting up we heard a countdown… 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 – with lots of cheers. Tyler and I looked at each other. And a flood of children came rushing in to ask about Erica. We calculated in that day we spoke and interacted with approximately 2000 young people and teachers.

3/12/14: Packing for the big bang in Birmingham.

From 13^th March to 16^th March ECS will be represented at the Big Bang Festival in Birmingham. We will be doing a number of things:

• Erica the Rhino will be there for the full four days (more about packing for Erica’s holiday to Birmingham will be coming later in this post).
• On Friday, there will be Student Robotics, where participants will have the chance to have a go at robotics.
• On Saturday there will be the chance to go to a mockup cleanroom where they will get to learn about nanotechnology.

I will be using this blog to tell you about the daily adventures at the Big Bang but also keep an eye out for my tweet updates. Follow me on @rees_p.

I mentioned earlier that @EricaTheRhino  was heading up to Birmingham. It took a lot of preparation to get her ready for her journey. This all started around 3 months ago. The Erica team got together to discuss what needed to be doing in order to make her ‘people friendly’ and not temperamental technology wise. A number of changes were made by a fabulous group of people. These are significant changes:

• Changing the screen to the side of Erica to a touch screen. This means that it is easier to interact with. One screen was placed higher on one side and lower on the other to make it easier for people of different sizes (!) to interact with her.
• A lot of the internals were changed in order to make Erica more robust and travel friendly.
• There is a separate touch screen which gives an indication  of how Erica is feeling and allows Erica to be feed her, its also possible to tickle her and move her ear.
• There is also the added functionality of being able to tweet at Erica in order to change the light colour.
• We upgraded the plinth Erica is on to make transport easier.
• If you look inside Erica you will notice she is much tidier! We have decided that when she travels its easier to take the board out so this allows us to do that.
• We have also added the option to use a wired internet connection for increased reliability. This has proved to work really well.
• We have upgraded the LEDs so they work better.
• The speakers have been upgraded so her roar is much louder

Erica had to packed in bubble wrap and got to Birmingham safely:

3/12/14: Packing for the big bang in Birmingham.

From 13^th March to 16^th March ECS will be represented at the Big Bang Festival in Birmingham. We will be doing a number of things:

*Erica the Rhino will be there for the full four days (more about packing for Erica’s holiday to Birmingham will be coming later in this post).

*On Friday, there will be Student Robotics, where participants will have the chance to have a go at robotics.

* On Saturday there will be the chance to go to a mockup cleanroom where they will get to learn about nanotechnology.

I will be using this blog to tell you about the daily adventures at the Big Bang but also keep an eye out for my tweet updates. Follow me on @rees_p.

I mentioned earlier that @EricaTheRhino  was heading up to Birmingham. It took a lot of preparation to get her ready for her journey. This all started around 3 months ago. The Erica team got together to discuss what needed to be doing in order to make her ‘people friendly’ and not temperamental technology wise. A number of changes were made by a fabulous group of people. These are significant changes:

• Changing the screen to the side of Erica to a touch screen. This means that it is easier to interact with. One screen was placed higher on one side and lower on the other to make it easier for people of different sizes (!) to interact with her.
• A lot of the internals were changed in order to make Erica more robust and travel friendly.
• There is a separate touch screen which gives an indication  of how Erica is feeling and allows Erica to be feed her, its also possible to tickle her and move her ear.
• There is also the added functionality of being able to tweet at Erica in order to change the light colour.
• We upgraded the plinth Erica is on to make transport easier.
• If you look inside Erica you will notice she is much tidier! We have decided that when she travels its easier to take the board out so this allows us to do that.
• We have also added the option to use a wired internet connection for increased reliability. This has proved to work really well.
• We have upgraded the LEDs so they work better.
• The speakers have been upgraded so her roar is much louder.

You can tweet @EricaTheRhino  certain colours like Red, blue or pink and her lights will change to that colour. Or you can follow her and she will tweet you,

You can tweet @EricaTheRhino  certain colours like Red, blue or pink and her lights will change to that colour. Or you can follow her and she will tweet you.

On 7^th March ECS were VERY lucky to have 70  female pupils from various school visit the department. We invited them its international womens day on the 8^th March and we wanted to celebrate this as part of Univeristy of Southampton’s international women’s day celebrations. There were 5 Schools that attended. These were:

• Park High (London)
• Testwood School (Southampton)
• St-Edmonds (Salisbury)
• ALNS (Portsmouth)
• Sturnminster (Dorset)

We were pleased that we had a range of schools from a range of different areas. The pupils began their day with the opportunity to visit a lecture theatre  and have a welcome talk by Professor Michael Butler and Professor Dame Wendy Hall.

Professor Michael Butler is our Athena Swan champion, which means he does a lot of work to promote and support women in ECS. It was also under his guidance the department achieved a bronze award, which we are really proud of. Michael talked to the female pupils about computing. He gave a key message that stayed with us all for the entire day: ‘Technology is too important to be left to men’. This was first said by Professor Karen Spark Jones from Cambridge University and has since been used as inspiration by many notable women in computing. One pupil said that she found it interesting when Michael said that a British company called ARM made the chip inside the iPhone. She said that it made the manufacturing and creating of technology closer to home and something she felt she would like to get involved in.

Pupils also got to listen to Professor Dame Wendy Hall. Wendy is Dean of the faculty and does a lot of work with the Web Science Institute, which is an organization that observes and researches how the web is evolving and its impact on the world at large. Her job allows her to travel around the world and meet cool people like David Beckham! But she also has close links with Sir Tim Berners Lee and has met the Queen a number of times. One pupil said that she never thought working in computing would allow someone to travel a lot. They were very impressed.

Pupils were then taken in various groups to do different activities. There were three different activities:

• Optoelectronics: Pupils were given the chance to learn about the concepts of electronics and light.
• Robotics: Pupils were given the chance to work with Lego Mindstorms.
• Nanotechnology: Pupils were given the chance to learn about what happens in a cleanroom and the impact of nanotechnology on the wider world.

We have worked hard to provide activities and expertise that pupils would not have had at school. We also provided a tour of the university as well as volunteers from the computer science and electronics department. The quote of the day was:

‘Using tech is cool… but i found out today that making tech is simply awesome’