We get a fruit and veg box delivered each week, and generally if there is an option that we don’t like or don’t use that much we can set a delivery preference to say we don’t want it. However, kiwi fruit is one of those things which I never take off the list of options because … well actually I’m not sure why – I suspect I feel that we *should* be eating it – but so often we end up putting soft kiwis in the compost bin.
So a couple of weeks ago I decided enough was enough – and I really should do something with the kiwis. One recipe I’ve used before is Jamie Oliver’s kiwi salsa (part of his fish taco recipe) which I recommend, but I was looking for something different – so I decided to try making kiwi jam.
I used to be a real stickler for following recipes to the letter, but years of living with D and reading food writers like Nigel Slater, plus some confidence in my ability to cook, has meant I’m more ready to experiment and deviate from the recipe.
The recipe says to leave the skin on the kiwis, but I knew D wouldn’t like that, so I just scooped out the insides with a teaspoon instead. I’d mixed up the kiwi and sugar and was adding the lemon when I realised I was a little short on lemon – so I was wondering what I could add that was ‘citrusy’ and remembered a bottle of grapefruit gin I had in the cupboard (a Christmas present) – so I added a few splashes of that as well (it was total guess work – I was adding a bit more than I would have of lemon juice to try to get the flavour through – but still measured in teaspoons I’d say).
Grapefruit gin
Having mixed this all up, I put everything in a small pan (I only had 8 kiwis so I wasn’t making huge amounts) and cooked it until it went “jammy”. I thought I’d overdone it as it was quite thick and sticky even when hot – but I think it actually turned out pretty well.
I poured boiling water into a couple of jam jars, let them sit for a few minutes, then poured it out, and put the jam in. Making in small quantities meant I wasn’t really worried about the jars being completely sterile (which, to be honest, is the thing that I struggle with most when making jam!).
The end product was delicious – quite sweet, with the gooseberry qualities of the kiwi fruit coming through and the grapefruit gin just very faintly at the back of it.
I tried another batch this week but substituted the lemon juice with grapefruit juice (as we had a grapefruit in our delivery box) and left out the gin – the result was more “tart” than the original jam, and I missed the herbally/gin note that my first attempt had – so I think I’d definitely add the gin again next time – perhaps tweaking the amount of lemon.
If you haven’t tried kiwi jam I’d highly recommend – it’s really good!
On Sunday 15th March 2020, B (12) developed a persistent cough. By Monday evening the UK government had advised that any household where one person had either a persistent cough or a temperature (symptoms of COVID-19 infection) should isolate for 14 days. It’s now the end of the first week of our isolation as a family and it struck me (as I’m sure it has struck many others) that I should record what it’s like for us living through this – an event with a more extreme impact on our daily lives than anything I can remember.
In the house are:
Owen (me), dad & husband
D, wife, mum and amazing
B (12), son
F (almost 9), daughter
F is probably the member of the family who has struggled the most with the situation. She says when we told her about this she realised that she probably couldn’t do anything she wanted:
going outside
going to school
seeing her friends
having her birthday party
going on a birthday theatre trip to see “Magic goes wrong”
family Easter holiday to Wales
That’s a lot of disappointment for a 9 year old to take in. She understands it’s for safety but it’s still really upsetting. Finding a routine for F has been challenging this week. She generally is happy to do some Maths and English in the morning, and is quite happy until about lunch, but then things start to get more difficult.
In many ways my life is the least affected out of the whole family – I already worked at home, and I spend a lot of time in virtual meetings already. Obviously having everyone else at home has made working harder and lots of people I work with are also impacted by the situation – so it hasn’t quite been “business as usual”. My main social activity is singing in a choir and of course all face-to-face rehearsals have been cancelled for the foreseeable future – so we’ve been trying online sessions (I’ll try to do a separate post on what we’ve been doing in case it’s useful to others) – and that’s meant I’ve spent more time online this week.
D misses the luxury of being able to do what we want, and I think has found the first week quite stressful.
B was the person who got ill, and has been ill all week – not seriously, but enough for him to be tired easily (although he keeps insisting he’s “feeling better today”). He’s very self-motivated and loves doing school work and study, and creating projects for himself – so apart from the illness he isn’t unhappy. If he was at home with just me I think we’d both just work happily all day, but with four of us in the house, especially with F around as well, this is more distracting and difficult for him. But he’s very adaptable and thoughtful – yesterday he created a worksheet for him and F to do about animals, and he has plans for more worksheets for next week, including one based around “Miraculous: Tales Of Ladybug & Cat Noir” a favourite TV series with them currently.
We’re lucky we’ve got enough computers in the house, and good broadband, so us all being online and working at the same time hasn’t been a huge problem (one of the computers is a bit crappy, but definitely usable).
To try and help with the feelings of frustration and to keep a routine I put up a whiteboard (which has been sitting unused and waiting for me to put it up for months!) and made space for a “wishlist” of things we all want to do while we are stuck at home, and a “daily timetable”. Realising that one of the things that had affected F most was the lack of control over things we suggested the kids create “I choose” cards that they can play each day which allows them to override whatever we are asking them to do at the time and lets them doing the thing they want. They get four “I choose” cards a day and they are things like “I choose to watch TV for 30 minutes”. I’m not sure these have been quite as successful as I hoped, but they have at least given some degree of choice to F.
“Had a band and we tried real hard”
Because we’ve been confined to the house & garden, we really haven’t been able to get out at all – so food has been a bit of a worry. Overall we have a freezer full of stuff and lots of non-perishable food in the pantry – but we’ve never been great at meal planning, and have often relied on the fact its easy to pop to the shop. Luckily we’ve got friends and relatives locally who have done some shopping for us – huge thanks to my cousin (J) and P & M at Warwick Books who have done shopping runs for us!
We already have a weekly delivery of fruit, veg, meat and fish from Abel and Cole and this week that came as usual – we are hoping this keeps going (although uncertainty about this is one of the stressful things – in terms of food planning – what can we count on for next week?). We were also lucky enough to be able to register with Milk & More so as long as they have stock we’ll have regular supplies of milk, yoghurt, juice and other basic perishables.
Door step delivery
One positive I’m taking from this situation is how much we already support small and local businesses – partly, sadly, because we are only too aware of what impact this situation is going to have on people we know locally. But there is more we can do – for example I now feel we should have signed up to Milk & More ages ago (what could be better than milk delivered to the door?) and we could have been doing more to shop locally – I’m determined that we’ll make more of an effort with this from now on.
The food situation has also made me much more aware of things we have been wasting (throwing out unused food) and start making sure we reduce our waste. I’ve been baking bread (although bread flour has been in short supply) – thanks to a course at Haddie and Trilby I’d just re-started baking bread so I was well prepared! I’ve started making jam with kiwi fruit we often get in our Abel and Cole box (and so many kiwi fruit have gone into our compost its embarrassing). Yesterday I even made brown chicken stock from left over bones & scraps (I’m planning to post recipes on this blog separately so won’t detail here). So overall we are eating well (perhaps better than usual in some respects).
Homemade bread with kiwi and grapefruit jam
Now the weekend is here I’ve had time to relax a bit (juggling work around everything else has been quite a challenge) and yesterday spent time in the garden doing some well overdue tasks (digging out the compost, mowing the lawn), and today I’m planning to do some more work (more mowing) and F has been putting together some ideas for setting up a “play area” in the garden (nothing too ambitious – chalk marks on the paving slabs for games etc.)
Where I’ve been able to make the space and time to do so, I’ve actually enjoyed being more of a ‘home maker’ – but one of the things I’ve realised this weekend is that we spend a lot of our weekend going out and maybe we should do more at home (F said “this would be a great weekend except we don’t have a choice about it”)
While there have been ups, there have also been downs – by Wednesday morning D and I were informed at high volume that we were “the worst people ever and I can’t believe I have to spend two weeks stuck here with you”. I find it hard not to just give in to demands to watch TV just so that I can get on with my work. Both D and I have tried getting up early to do work before kids are around – which sort of works, but then leaves me exhausted later in the day. So it can be tough – but I’m definitely staying positive at the moment and feel we are doing pretty well all things considered
Next week we’ll have more challenges no doubt – the kids will do their first online Art lesson from Jess at Art Group Studios and we are hoping that some online kung fu lessons can be set up for F. B is hoping to be well enough to get on with the work the school is starting to send home.
I’m hoping I’ll do some more regular updates in this diary rather than just once a week – but I know my good intentions often remain just that – we’ll see!
This project was to enable us to play audio content (music/podcasts/radio) from our iPhones/iPad in the kitchen. It took me under an hour to complete…
Why?
We already use the Apple Airplay facility to play audio content in our living room using iOS devices + an AppleTV connected to a sound system. We wanted to get a similar setup in our kitchen at a low cost.
Time needed
The initial work took my under an hour, but then the subsequent troubleshooting (see Issues below) took another couple of hours at least.
Kit
Raspberry Pi Model B
Wifi Dongle
Logitech mm50 (or similar)
This set of kit was chosen for no better reason than I had it lying around not really doing anything (my son uses the Raspberry Pi sometimes but generally uses an old laptop rather than the Pi now).
The Logitech mm50 (http://www.macworld.com/article/1046722/logitechmm50.html) is an old iPod doc with an audio line in for a 3.5mm audio jack. As far as I can see the Logitech Pure-Fi Anywhere 2 is the same basic product (http://support.logitech.com/en_us/product/pure-fi-anywhere2). You can pick either of these models up second hand on eBay for under £30 (quite possibly much less).
This is open source software which enables streaming of audio (not video) content using Apple’s airplay protocol. It is a fork of the original Shairport software (which is no longer in development) but has added extra functions and seems to be under active development.
The Build
(ok, calling this a ‘build’ is over selling it a bit …)
All the software side of this project was based on the instructions at http://www.redsilico.com/multiroom-audio-raspberry-pi. For my purposes I didn’t need a DAAP/iTunes server because we only wanted to play audio directly from our iOS devices, which all support AirPlay already. I also already had the Raspberry Pi setup with the Wifi dongle so I basically started from the section headed “Install AirPlay software” using the instructions for shairport-sync.
I also checked and read through the instructions for shairport-sync on the shairport-sync github page to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.
Having installed the software and got it running, I attached the Logitech speakers to the Pi and successfully played music from my phone to the Pi – the tech part was done.
The Logitech mm50 (and the Logitech Pure-Fi Anywhere series) have two little metal feet that swing out at the back to stand up the speakers. I drilled a couple of small holes in each of these, then using these holes screwed the device upside down to the underside of a kitchen cabinet (and near a power socket but away from anything that might cause problems like steam from the kettle).
Then I used a large drill bit to drill a large enough hole to fit through the wires/connectors (the power cable for the Pi and the audio cable to join the Pi to the mm50). Finally, I put the Pi in the cupboard, pushe through the power and audio connectors, plugged everything in, and that was it – all done!
Issues
I immediately tested the setup and it worked perfectly – I was able to stream music, BBC radio iPlayer content, Podcast content from my phone to the Pi.
However when I came back the next day and tried to use it again, my phone didn’t display the Pi as an Airplay option. I found that various things seemed to make the Pi display as an Airplay option again, but it always went away when it wasn’t in use and I had to somehow ‘trigger’ it again (one odd thing was that the Pi continued to display as an Airplay source in iTunes on my Mac, even when it didn’t appear on my phone). I reported this as an issue on the shairport-sync Github site and the developer (Mike Brady – who is very responsive and helpful) responded with some hints. After doing quite a bit of Googling, digging into how so called ‘zero-conf’ works, and looking at documentation around Airplay, I finally found the issue was not with shairport-sync or any of these things, but actually the Wifi dongle I was using going into some low power mode which meant it needed a prompt to ‘wake up’ and work.
Both our children are currently big Octonauts fans – if you haven’t come across the Octonauts, they are a team of underwater explorers who featured in a series of books by a Canadian duo jointly known as Meomi. The books have been made into an incredibly popular TV cartoon shown in the UK on the CBeebies channel (the BBC channel aimed at younger children).
Whenever there is an emergency, Captain Barnacle will order “Sound the Octo-alert!” – the big button with the distinctive Octopus logo will be pressed, and alarms sounds, and the Octonauts report for duty. As I said, both our children are big fans, and Freya does a mean Octo-alert imitation, so when I was looking for a new Arduino project to do with Bryn, I thought building a working Octo-alert would be great fun.
While you can get an extension (called a shield) for an Arduino to record and play sound (e.g. http://www.ladyada.net/make/waveshield/) I hadn’t got one of these, and I thought a simpler (and in some ways more satisfying) approach would be to have the Arduino joined up to the computer and have a button on the Arduino trigger a sound/video file on the computer. A quick search found the Octoalert website – with a clickable Octo-alert image which then plays an mp3 of the Octo-alert sound. Given this was already there and worked, my idea morphed into triggering the alert from this website by simulating a ‘click’ on the image.
However, before we got to this point we needed to build an appropriate Arduino circuit and craft a button and console. The Arduino circuit is a very simple one – just a single button wired up to an LED and of course a pin on the Arduino. Once I’d put the circuit diagram on, Bryn was able to get going on the wiring. Some of the components are still a bit fiddly for Bryn to put into the breadboard by himself, but for the wires he can follow the diagram and put the wires in himself. I helped with the bits he couldn’t manage, and generally supervised him – but he could do a lot of this himself.
To create the button we cut in half a small plastic ball, Damyanti drew the logo, and Bryn set to work glueing on orange tissue paper
A simple ‘button press’ program for the Arduino is available from http://www.oomlout.com/oom.php/products/ardx/circ-07 and I adapted this slightly so that the LED flashed several times on a single button press, and so the button also controlled the output to the serial port – which allows the Arduino to send data back to the computer it is joined to. The Arduino code looked like this:
// set pin numbers:
const int buttonPin = 3; // the number of the pushbutton pin
const int ledPin = 9; // the number of the LED pin
// variables will change:
int buttonState = 0; // variable for reading the pushbutton status
void setup() {
// initialize the LED pin as an output:
pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
// initialize the pushbutton pin as an input:
pinMode(buttonPin, INPUT);
// initialize serial port
Serial.begin(9600);
}
int interval_time = 500;
void loop(){
// read the state of the pushbutton value:
buttonState = digitalRead(buttonPin);
// check if the pushbutton is pressed.
// if it is, the buttonState is HIGH:
if (buttonState == HIGH) {
// LED off:
digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);
Serial.println("0");
delay(interval_time);
} else {
// turn LED on:
Serial.println("1");
for (int i=0;i < 10;i++) {
digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);
delay(500);
digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);
delay(500);
}
delay(interval_time);
}
}
On the computer side I needed a mechanism to read the output on the serial port – I found a hint on how to do this here http://playground.arduino.cc/Interfacing/Ruby. I also needed a way of accessing the Octoalert website – I knew there was a Ruby Gem to control a browser called Watir, so I got this installed, and after a few false starts (the task was complicated by the fact that clicking the button on the website actually runs some javascript) I got some code working that could read the input from the Arduino and trigger the necessary javascript on the website:
#!/usr/bin/ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'watir-webdriver'
require 'serialport'
#params for serial port
port_str = "/dev/tty.usbmodem1411"
baud_rate = 9600
data_bits = 8
stop_bits = 1
parity = SerialPort::NONE
sp = SerialPort.new(port_str, baud_rate, data_bits, stop_bits, parity)
browser = Watir::Browser.new
#just read forever
while true do
while (i = sp.gets) do
puts i
if i.to_i > 0
browser.goto "http://octoalert.com"
browser.link(:id,"playLink").fire_event "onclick"
sleep(7)
browser.goto "http://brynpatelstephens.com"
else
puts "No Octoalert"
end
end
end
With this code running on the computer, and the Arduino program loaded to the board we had a working button – we now needed to put the whole thing together.
A bit of improvisation with some cardboard and we mounted the Octo-alert button in such a way it could sit over the Arduino and pushing down on it pushed the actual button on the Arduino. I cut a hole in a cardboard box for the button to be mounted in, and Bryn decorated it in the style of the Octonauts instrument panel.
This was a nice project, in that it mixed some nice crafting (glueing the tissue paper, making the control panel) with a very simple circuit – all of which Bryn could either do by himself, or with a small amount of help. The programming was slightly more tricky, and I just got on this with while Bryn did other stuff – but I explained a bit about how the Arduino was able to ‘talk’ to the computer which I think he got. He also was quite concerned that by using the sound/graphic from the website that we were ‘stealing’ another’s work – which meant an opportunity to talk about the web and how it worked – although I’m not entirely sure he understood my explanation of using the website versus copying the files – and to be honest I’m not sure I quite understand it either – after all in both cases you end up with a copy of the file on your computer!
And it wasn’t just fun for me and Bryn – Freya got to join in too as you can see in this video – yes, it’s time to sound the Octo-alert 🙂
Bryn’s recent 5th birthday brought with it an extremely cool Dinosaur toy (available from Maplins in the UK). It consisted of a set of cleverly engineered cardboard cutouts which you fold and join to make a T-Rex, coupled with a motor, cogs, wires, battery box, switch and plastic stick, which all join together to make the cardboard T-Rex move and gnash it’s teeth when you’ve put it all together.
Bryn and I built it (although to be honest the cardboard folding/joining was pretty fiddly, and while he pushed the motor, battery box etc. in the base confidently, I had to do most of the construction of the cardboard model. The result was much much better than I really expected. The dinosaur moved (on the spot) and it’s teeth gnashed pretty effectively – enough for Bryn to play a game of putting his finger near it’s mouth and getting ‘bitten’.
The next day, I had an idea that if the dinosaur’s motor could be driven off our arduino, we could wire the dinosaur up. I asked Bryn, if he’d like to do this as a project and he was keen, so the next day we sat down to do this.
The most recent project we’d done with the arduino had been using a light sensitive resistor to detect light levels and switch an LED on/off, so making the dinosaur light activated seemed an obvious way to go. I got the basic motor circuit design out (details at http://www.oomlout.com/oom.php/products/ardx/circ-03) and started to try to work out how wire the photo-resistor.
While I was doing this, I was pretty impressed that Bryn just got on and wired up the motor circuit from the diagram pinned to the breadboard. While I had to put the more fiddly components in, all the wires Bryn did without prompting or help.
I was able to wire up the photo-resistor separately on the same breadboard (using http://www.oomlout.com/oom.php/products/ardx/circ-09) – including (at Bryn’s request) an LED also to be controlled by light levels. I have to admit it took me a little while to work out the wiring, and this led me to just write the code to run the circuit without really getting Bryn to help – which I was sorry about afterwards.
I’d got some concerns about whether the arduino board would drive the motor OK, as I hadn’t been able to establish what voltage/current was required for the motor. The circuit above uses a transistor to enable the arduino to drive a small toy motor, but I wasn’t sure if it would be enough for the dinosaurs motor (which usually runs off two AA batteries).
We covered the photo-resistor – and success. The dinosaur leapt (if slightly lethargically as the motor clearly not quite getting the power it really needed) to life. A dinosaur that comes to life when you switch the lights off!
I guess the next step would be to get some LEDs on wires to push through the cardboard as eyes, and some sound effects …
Last night we got back from the fireworks display at Warwick Racecourse, and Damyanti suggested making some hot chocolate, having found a recipe in ‘delicious’ magazine which included double cream, vanilla paste and Frangelico liqueur – none of which we had, and the last of which we’d never heard of. Frangelico turned out to be a hazelnut liqueur.
So I improvised and came up with this alternative (amounts for one mug):
Hot milk
1 tsp cocoa powder
2 tsp sugar
1 tsp Nutella
1 shot brandy (depending on how you like it – just under a shot and I’d say you won’t get the brandy flavour, but you will know there is alcohol in it)
Adding the Nutella seemed to help mellow out the brandy, and make the drink just the thing for a chilly autumn night.
We love to have American style pancakes as a weekend breakfast treat. Until recently my favourite recipe was one I found on (no longer operational) Google Knol by Scott Jenson – luckily the recipe is preserved in several places online, including this site called Tastebook.
Because we don’t always have buttermilk in the house I’d occasionally played around with alternatives, and had a bit of success mixing yoghurt and milk – but I found if I got the proportions wrong in this mix, the flavour was a bit off. Then one day I had some left over sour cream, and used that, mixed with milk, in place of buttermilk. The result was the tastiest and fluffiest pancakes I’ve made:
Wet ingredients
About 100ml sour cream mixed with 200ml milk. The amounts are quite rough here, because I tend to use whatever sour cream I’ve got, and top up with milk (and rarely note exact measurements). I try to be a bit conservative with the milk – you can always thin the batter with some more milk later.
1 egg
50g melted butter
1-2 tsps vanilla extract
Dry ingredients
125g strong white flour
40g caster sugar
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
Mix the wets and drys separately, then mix them together and let them rest for few minutes for the raising agents to start working. The resulting batter should be a bit lumpy. How thick you make the batter is up to you – if you make it on the thicker side you’ll get thicker pancakes that will need to cook a little slower to cook all the way through in the pan.
“Dad, can we play Arduino this morning?” asked 4 year old Bryn at the weekend – music to the ears of a geek parent 🙂 We had such a pleasant hour building and using a temperature sensor I thought I ought to blog it, and also another project we did quite a while back getting the Arduino to play sounds. (see also my previous post on the first two projects we did)
Music Maker
This was a project we did a while ago. Again we were playing with the Arduino at Bryn’s request, and he asked if we could make some sounds. I knew there was a piezo speaker in the starter kit we had, so I looked up the example circuit that used it, and found it played “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” (or Twinkle Twinkle Traffic Light for those of you with similarly aged children).
We worked together to wire up the circuit, and then I downloaded the program (http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Melody) and we loaded it onto the Arduino. Uploading the program to the board is one of the easiest things for Bryn to do on the computer side – just clicking an icon to compile and upload the program. The nice thing about this is that it emphasises the connection between the program on the computer and the behaviour of the circuit.
This worked fine, but wasn’t quite what Bryn wanted – he said he wanted to push a button to make music. Since this required me to get my head round wiring up and programming a button – which I’d not done before – I went for the simplest thing I could think of, and set up a button so it would play a random note from a C major scale (within an octave range). I was pretty happy to get this working.
But Bryn was still not happy – he wanted several buttons, each one to play a different note – essentially he wanted to build an electronic piano 🙂 After some more work we got there – 3 push buttons, each playing a different note (I only had 3 buttons in the kit, so we couldn’t do anymore). Bryn was very happy with this.
We had a lot of fun, but it was harder to get Bryn engaged on the programming side with this one. The transformation of frequencies into specific notes clearly makes it difficult to relate the program to simple notes, and ‘melody’ code isn’t the most elegant in the world. But it was nice that Bryn had a clear idea in his head of what he wanted it to do, and we worked towards getting it working together.
Temperature sensor
This was the most recent project, following Bryn’s request at the weekend. Unlike with the music project, Bryn didn’t have any particular idea this time round, but I was inspired both by the fact it was shaping up to be a warm day, and the fact the Arduino starter kit has a temperature sensor in it. Even before started the build, this gave us a chance to talk about temperature and thermometers – of course thermometers are pretty familiar ground to a young child, and since our daughter had been ill recently Bryn had seen the thermometer in action quite a few times.
We built the basic circuit – actually one of the simplest so far and Bryn was able to put wires in at my direction, only needing my help with the temperature sensor itself, and with a few wires on the occasions when they didn’t slip into the breadboard without a bit of a push.
Once we had it wired up, I showed Bryn the output on the computer screen – this was the temperature in celsius being taken at frequent intervals. Bryn was able to read the numbers on screen. We measured the temperature in our dining area, where we did the build, and then moved into the conservatory. We could see the numbers go up which gave a chance to talk about “higher” and “lower” and how the numbers were higher because it was (noticeably) warmer.
Then we went on a measuring spree – outside (cooler); fridge (cooler but not by much); Freezer (took a while but went below zero). With the freezer we had to wait quite a while watching the numbers go down and down before it got below zero – but Bryn seemed to enjoy every minute of it. While we waited we talked about the ‘scale’ and I explained how 100 was for boiling water and 0 was for freezing.
Then more measuring upstairs, finding the warmest bedroom (ours!).
Although there wasn’t much to change in the program, I showed Bryn how there was a number in the program that told the Arduino which analogue pin the sensor was connected to. We then moved the wire to another pin, he could read the number from the board (with a bit of help) and type the new number into the program, and upload it to the Arduino so the new configuration worked.
It was a great project, and lots of good stuff to share and learn. In an ideal world I would have liked to design a better way of displaying the temperature on the computer in advance – something colour coded, with large digits reflecting an average reading. However, Bryn seemed relatively comfortable just reading the number from the serial port monitor!
Not quite sure where to blog this, so it’s going here on our rather unloved personal/food blog (for a better loved blog you might want to have a look at the stuff Damyanti has been doing over on Overdue Books)
For a while now I’ve been wondering how I might introduce Bryn (now 4) to the concepts of computer programming. I’d looked at all the usual ‘programming for kids’ stuff, and had a look at Scratch, Hackety Hack and other languages aimed at children learning to programme, but felt this would all be difficult for a 3-4 year old to get to grips with – especially as he isn’t yet reading and has only recently started writing – although he can recognise letters and numbers.
I did find a couple of approaches that were fun for both of us which were the Lightbot game and a Constructa-Bot (a programmable ‘robot’ aimed at the primary school market) – both of which require you to plan a series of moves, and programming them into a robot (one virtual and one physical). Lightbot was fun, but got too hard too quickly. The Constructa-Bot works well, and I think will get more use in the future – partly this is about thinking up ‘games’ to play with the bot.
At the same time I’ve had it in mind for a while to get myself an Arduino kit to play with. Arduino is an “open-source electronics prototyping platform” – essentially allowing you to build electronics circuits – and write software to run on it. A really simple example of what you can do is wire up a circuit with an LED and make it blink on and off as detailed at http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Blink. To encourage me, Damyanti got me a book on programming Arduino for Christmas and so I ordered an introductory kit from oomlout.
While the Arduino was for me, and I hadn’t even thought of doing it with Bryn – I guess I assumed it would be fiddly and a bit difficult – it has already proved a great way of engaging Bryn with basic concepts of electronics, programming and just the basic idea that these are tools that can be used to create.
So far we’ve done two little ‘projects’:
Colour wheels
This was the first one we did together. Damyanti drew some circles on a piece of card, and Bryn decorated them with lines, squiggles, spots, spirals and stars. They did this while I worked out how to wire up a motor, and got a programme (or ‘sketch’ as they are called for arduinos – no idea why) written that would just spin the motor for a number of seconds.
Having got this working we attached the ‘wheels’ to the motors spindle and watched what happened to the colours and patterns as it span around. Bryn was immediately interested in the circuit and how the motor was controlled – and once I’d got the cursor in the right place in the programme he could type in numbers to set the length of time the motor would spin for each time, and then press the button to upload the sketch to the Arduino board.
Traffic Lights
After the colour wheel project both Bryn and I wanted to do something else. I asked for suggestions on Twitter and I think it was @bencc who suggested traffic lights – which immediately seemed like an ideal project. I had red and green LEDs, and Bryn has plenty of toy cars, and I knew that even my basic Arduino knowledge could manage a simple circuit and programme which would change the lights at set intervals.
This time Bryn was keen to help with the whole circuit – so we did this together, and this worked better than I thought. Although wiring stuff up (using a ‘breadboard’ to plug the components into) proved a bit fiddly, and some of the components I had to do, Bryn was able to plug the connecting wires in with only a very little help.
I’d got the (very simple) programme ready, and we uploaded it, and played around with the time between the lights changing – doing some very very short times to get a flickering affect, and longer times that might be more suitable for traffic lights.
The next stage of the project was to make a box for the Arduino to slot into to make the ‘traffic lights’ – Damyanti found a suitable box, cut some holes in the right places and got it ready for Bryn to decorate – we got out a road that Bryn and Damyanti had made a while ago and some toy cars – and you can see the results in the picture above.
Next…?
The challenge is to think of projects that are fun, engaging, and within my ability to carry out (as well as Bryn’s!) – any suggestions welcome :). I love the way the two projects above combine fun, creativity and technical concepts.
