Electronics and Computer Science Outreach

Today I was lucky enough to take a sneak peak at the year 9 computing girls club at Park High School in London. The club takes place at lunch time and the pupils and teachers were lucky enough to be able to loan out a Lego Mindstorms kit for the session. The results in just one hour were impressive with one Mindstorm being built and the other one whizzing around and speaking. The girls taking part in the club were selected by their teacher to help them to decide about whether they would like to take computing at GCSE. The girls were lively and enjoyed the activity. There was one young lady who helped her dad set up an internal network at home and another girl taking part in a cyber security challenge. The pupils I met today were a credit to the school. I went in to say hello and talk about career options in IT. We talked about the work culture at places like Google and Facebook. They learnt that in some big offices – things like food, coffee and tea were free to workers. This was impressive! I would like to help this school to obtain a Mindstorm for them to use in their lessons. They are currently really expensive for some schools to buy. I would like to thank this school for allowing me to be part of today and I want to congratulate them on nurturing some fabulous young girls. I hope to see them all in March for our women in tech conference at the University of Southampton.

On 31st January, Eric Cooke and I were lucky enough to go to Bryanston School. The school is wonderful and the students are great. This is the second year we have been and we were keen to go back this year when we were invited. This year we were invited to do two talks:

1. Cyber Security

2. Careers in technology.

1. The cyber security talk was very different to Huw Fryers talk that took place a on the 30th but focused on cases such as the Harold Shipman case. We also discusses security facts, with the main message being that it is very hard to delete anything off your computer. Anything can be recovered. So think twice! In fact the talk was more focused upon Cyber forensics and emphasised that the computer needed to be treated much like a real crime scene, you cannot contaminate evidence, report the evidence and analyse it.

2. The second session was a general session about careers and university life.

We have invited the wonderful students and teachers at Bryanston to a day at the university so they can see what it is like at university. I look forward to welcoming them soon.

Reena

On Thursday 30th January ECS were lucky enough to get a class visit from Testwood Sports College. We are lucky enough to have a good relationship with Testwood as this is is not the first time they have come to visit us! They are always welcome and we are always happy to see them. The schedule of the day was to begin with lunch, then a session on Cyber Security with Huw Fryer, a tour of campus and then a session on Web Science. Lets look at these in a bit more depth.

We went for lunch at the students union canteen. This has a selection of foods from around the world as well as sandwhiches and jacket potatoes! Its always good taking schools to lunch at places where uni students normally eat they then get a very real experience of university life. We then went to the Cyber Crime session. This session was given by Huw Fryer. He is a PhD student who did his first degree in Law and is very interested in computer security so he pursued a PhD. Below is a picture of Huw delivering the session.

Huw doing his computer security session – 30th Jan

The session was an interactive one which focused upon passwords. Mainly how easy they were to hack into and how easy they are to guess. He emphasised that if you know enough about someone , its easy to get their password info. He also emphasised the importance of not having the same password for everything and why it is important to change passwords regularly. He also did some work on Phishing to help pupils understand about websites which were real and not real. The students asked great questions about hacking, passwords and web security.

We then said good bye to Huw and had a tour of campus and the computer labs. Here is a preview of what they saw:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfY4DJyHKew&feature=player_embedded

We then had a session with the Web Science Team. Web Science is a new discipline in the department. It is interdisciplinary so it helps to combine subjects like law or sociology to help analyse the web. Its a new subject that we want to promote and help local schools engage with as its something that everyone can get involved in.

Web Science talk.

The talk focused on the spreading of rumours in social works. It looked at network theory and trolling. The talk raised questions about how different people use the web in different ways. The talk was fab and it was certainly a talking point for the group from Testwood!

I hope to see them again and I hope they had a great time.

Learn with US Year 8 Taster Day. Monday 20th January 2014. 

Today I was lucky enough to take part in a Learn with US workshop. These sessions are organised by the Universities central outreach department. Three different schools come in for an hours session. Each school rotates and does different activities. Today I met year 8 students from three schools:

• Bitterne Park School 
• Toynbee School
• St Georges School 

It was a great session with fabulous pupils. The aim of the session was on ‘Wearable Technology’. We looked at how school uniforms could be transformed with technology, how wearable technology could be used in health and sustainability with the environment. In particular, the types of technology we discussed were temperature sensors and light sensors.

Here are some great ideas by the schools I saw today. I think they are very creative and the pupils who came along are a credit to their schools.

• Bitterne Park School

Bitterne Park came up with an amazing set of ideas to extend the functionality of school uniforms using technology. There were great ideas such as a Beanie hat, which acts as a massager with acts automatically when stressed, but also stores relevant information from lessons to help with revision. This is the ultimate study tool as it helps with information but also helps welfare by keeping stress levels down. The figure below is a diagram of what the group did.

Another idea which was very original was Auto shoes which was made by recycled bottles and bags.  The aim of the shoe is to change depending on the situation. For example, in P.E. the shoe will change into a gym shoe and then change into a school shoe when P.E. is over. This is two of MANY fabulous ideas from Bitterne Park School.

• Toynbee School

Toynbee School had a different challenge. They had to picks some real life problems and had to use wearable technology to enhance life. We had great suggestions. The featured project is a simple t-shirt or jumper with the ability to put on any picture or design onto their t-shirt by taking a photo on their phone and then a picture could be put on it using blue-tooth. The design was called ‘where what you see’. Below is the poster:

Other ideas included a ‘heletopter’ that let out an airbag if someone was going to fall over. Or an attachment to glasses where by it could sense illnesses and tell you to rest accordingly.

• St Georges

St Georges was the final school of the day and came up with some wonderful ideas. A great idea from St Georges was a camera on the back to record and alert if anything gets stolen from rucksacks. They felt that this was something they thought was very useful. One group designed an away of gadgets for school uniforms such as a temperature controlled jumper and/or a self writing pad.

Conclusions 

I would just like to say thank you so much to all the schools and the outreach department at the University. Really enjoyed the day and I hope the schools did to. So if any schools like the idea of this then please get in touch!

Visit to Sturnmeister School Sixth From 

On Tuesday 14th January, I was very excited to give a talk to their sixth form students about STEM and University life. I gave a talk about STEM careers, ECS and the pro’s and con’s of University Life. There was an emphasis on how much their lives will change once they start university. It made me want to go back to being a student again! I am pleased to say that the Sixth form will be coming to the University for a taster day in the near future. Watch this space for updates.

 Sturnminsters Gifted and Talented group’s visit to ECS! 

On Friday 10th January 2014 we were REALLY lucky to have a group of 30 pupils from Sturnminster School. It was their group of gifted and talented pupils. The day kicked off with a welcome from me, explaining to the group what happens at a University. We then had a one hour session from the Web Science group who told us about privacy, social networks and trolling. This was a popular session as it was relevant to the pupils lives and it was a talking point for the day. We had lunch in the staff club and then had a tour of campus. The pupils were very surprised by the facilities we had on campus, the sports centre and student union were the favourites! They also had a soft spot for Erica the Rhino. Erica was also very timely as the group will be working on Raspberry Pis and starting with Python in a few weeks. We then had a session on Nanotechnology. This was very exciting as this was a subject the pupils were not familiar with. They were able to understand the relevance of a high tech research concept to their lives. They were then able to go on a tour of the clean rooms in order to understand the research in the department. We really enjoyed meeting the pupils and teachers at Sturminster School and cannot wait to see you again soon. The gender breakdown was 15 girls and 15 boys.

Erica the Rhino’s use in Outreach

This summer has been a busy one. I have been planning my wedding and also working with Marlands on goRhino. GoRhino is an awesome project, which aims to promote Rhino conservation. It meant that the University of Southampton’s bought an empty Rhino and the fab Erica team made it alive through using Raspberry Pi’s. My Raspberry Pi expertise doesn’t go much beyond setting it up and doing some very simple Python code but I helped promote the Rhino to the local schools. Erica the rhino really worked for outreach. I invited local schools to the university for an intro to pi’s session. It was good for them to see how people from the Uni used them for something as strange as Rhino. The students seemed to take to the sessions quite well and were very engaged. They are all coming back this academic year for a full on Python day.

The goRhino project had a HQ based in Marlands. They were kind enough to go to the shop twice a week and set up a Pi table to engage the local community pi’s and programming. This was great. Over the summer I introduced 402 kids to Raspberry Pi’s – 190 boys and 212 girls. The age group that came to the shop were mainly 0-7 year olds. So this age group was more drawn to Scratch rather than Python! In general I had an average of 10-12 minutes with each child, so they wanted something quick and easy to do. Scratch seemed to fit the bill as everyone liked making a cat explode (yes that is seriously what they did). Out of those 402 – I had 50 children (24 girls and 26 boys) return to me on subsequent weeks to show me their progress on Scratch. This was positive and inspiring. For each child that came along, I made sure they showed their parents what they had achieved at the end of the session. They were told about programming, downloading scratch at home and a mini lesson on Raspberry Pi’s. There were differences between girls and boys. Girls needed more encouragement to explore and experiment with the Pis, where as the boys were not scared of ‘going for it’. After the initial introduction activity of making cats explode they were given the option of making a game (either a maze game or a ping pong game). The boys were more likely to want to do this where as the girls wanted to go back to look at the rhinos or do the colouring in. Girls were more likely to agree to doing the extension activity if their parents had shown enthusiasm in the activity, where as this mattered less for the boys. Overall, parents were a massive factor in these sessions as they were always accompanied by parents. If parents used the computer sessions as a ‘baby sitting activity’ then the kids were less engaged – however if the parents were interested in what their children were learning about there was a better response from the children. Girls picked up on their parents interest much more than the boys. Doing these sessions were an absolute delight. Especially when children threw tantrums because they wanted to do my activity and they had to go home! You can find out more about the goRhino project here. You can find out more about Erica here. For enquiries about outreach, women in computing all at the University of Southampton email:
Reenapau@gmail.com