School Demo

[fredhag]

To set the stage... I got a listserv email from my daughter's teacher before Christmas break asking for volunteers to cut up light strings into individual lights with pigtails for their unit on electricity (the kids will be building small battery-operated light circuits to include in some crafty shoebox dioramas).  Of course, I volunteered to do them all (realizing too late that cutting and stripping wires for several hundred lights took more time than soldering up some LEs).  Anyhow, she responded that she knew our house based on the blinky lights every Christmas so I offered to do a school demo next week. 

Now I'm imagining teaching them the basics of relays (extension of what they are learning now about simple circuits), light switching (the rest of the hardware and commands from the computer), creating a Vixen sequence (just showing how information is laid out - the analogy of the sequencing table to a data table or spreadsheet and how they can set don the beats to a song), and then I'll demo a few short songs with a single 16-channel profile I'm planning to set up this weekend).

Since I saw a few old porch posts here about people doing similar school demos, I'm wondering if anyone has a Power Point or slide show for an educational demo about light animation that I can adapt?

[rrowan]

There is some info pdf and power point in the wiki

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Hope it helps

btw: you are not leaving any Lynx equipment there are you?
Sign up rules do state that Lynx equipment is not for anything besides your own property

Rick R.

[fredhag]

Ah, thanks!  I never thought of looking at the academy materials.  If I find anything to use, I'll contact the people for permission.

As for leaving equipment, I wouldn't do that, but the bigger motivation would be the liability if someone got shocked and came back to me.  The kids are 4th graders so I'll show them the hardware while unplugged.

[fredhag]

Not exciting and not many replies, but I thought I'd add a postmortem. 

It went very well. 

In the end, I decided to use a single LE for the demo, creating a PowerPoint with a video demo to start (get their attention and PowerPoint them to death), followed by the info.  I made a simple Vixen profile and a few sequences with 5 trees, a few inflatables and blow molds and some lights which left the rest of my LEs to spread around the tables for kids to get a close look at.  I had some props for Q&A including gemmy shooting stars and my self-designed and 3d-printed milk jug luminaries (I should probably post that separately at some point).

It turns out that instead of just my daughter's class, they brought in the entire grade and them some, a couple hundred students.  I had kids get involved such as having a couple of them doing sequencing (recording keystrokes). 

I got a lot of questions about how they can learn to do these things.  I gave them the standard thing of paying attention in their classes for one thing, i.e., as animation includes electronics, math, art, etc.  I should have had a handout for the 1-2% who would seriously want to learn more.

By the way, ~90% of them had been to houses with animated light shows this year.  Now this is coming from Richmond, VA, but I was still a little surprised.

[winwin]

It was not an easy task and it looks like you did very well. Congrats!

[mmciver]

Nice job.

Sent from my SCH-I605 using Tapatalk

[dmaccole]

... and my self-designed and 3d-printed milk jug luminaries (I should probably post that separately at some point).

Congrats on the presentation.

And, yeah, you've piqued my interest with "3d-printed milk jug luminaries."

\dmc