Author: Arjen

Growth fun: stock of physical resources

It’s most enjoyable being part of a growing company that’s helping to make a real difference for students and our future generation.

For our physical resources, we purposely don’t keep large stock as that would make things prohibitively expensive. The trade-off is that we can’t always do instant shipments. Typically, we do order in new items when we’re running low. It’s not an entirely straightforward process, since we have to assemble kits such as the Ginger Beer Classroom Kit and the Soldering Kit ourselves, by necessity from different sources.

When a product sees a particular spike in interest, we sometimes briefly run out. Actually that’s quite normal and it happens even with companies that keep lots of stock. When out-of-stock, we can generally fulfil the order within 1-2 weeks. A brief delay, but with the advantage that you get what you want, at a reasonable price, from a trusted Australian supplier with friendly service. We believe that these aspects adequately compensate for the lack of “instant gratification”…

So where are we at right now with our physical resources stock? A brief overview:Mirobot v2

If you have any questions about any of our products, please don’t hesitate to ask! Contact us.

Upcoming free event in Brisbane (24 November): Understanding Our World – showcase @ Seville (Holland Park)

At the start of 2016, Seville Road State School replaced their existing History and Geography units with the integrated Understanding Our World HASS + Science materials developed by OpenSTEM. As this school year draws to a close, we’d like to invite you to come and celebrate the marvellous outcomes that the students and teachers have achieved: Thursday 24 November 2016, 3:30pm.

This is your perfect opportunity to look at the materials and actual class work, as well as ask lots of questions! Meet with Cheryl Rowe (Principal), Andrea Budd (Head of Curriculum), several teachers, OpenSTEM’s Arjen Lentz (Chief Explorer) and Dr Claire Reeler, who leads the Understanding Our World program development.

Join us on Thursday 24 November 2016, 3:30pm at Seville Road State School library!

Free event.  RSVP today.  Drinks and nibbles will be provided.

You can also download this invite as a PDF leaflet to pass on to others.

What is Understanding Our World ?

  • Complete integrated units, 4 units per year level
  • Prep to Year 6, with multi-year level integration:
    • P-2: History and Geography + Science
    • 3-4: History, Geography and Civics & Citizenship + Science
    • 5-6: History, Geography, Civics & Citizenship and Economics & Business + Science
  • Aligned with the Australian Curriculum for HASS + Science (comprehensive)
  • Assessment tasks aligned with achievement standards in the Australian Curriculum
  • Teacher handbooks, student workbooks, assessment guides
  • Hundreds of beautiful colour resource PDFs with many custom maps and photos
  • More information: https://openstem.com.au/programs/understanding-our-world

exploringourworld-panel

Can’t make it on the 24th?
Contact OpenSTEM to arrange a visit to your school and discuss implementation options.

The rise and fall of the Gopher protocol | MinnPost

Twenty-five years ago, a small band of programmers from the University of Minnesota ruled the internet. And then they didn’t.

The committee meeting where the team first presented the Gopher protocol was a disaster, “literally the worst meeting I’ve ever seen,” says Alberti. “I still remember a woman in pumps jumping up and down and shouting, ‘You can’t do that!’ ”

Among the team’s offenses: Gopher didn’t use a mainframe computer and its server-client setup empowered anyone with a PC, not a central authority. While it did everything the U (University of Minnesota) required and then some, to the committee it felt like a middle finger. “You’re not supposed to have written this!” Alberti says of the group’s reaction. “This is some lark, never do this again!” The Gopher team was forbidden from further work on the protocol.

Read the full article (a good story of Gopher and WWW history!) at https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-gopher-protocol

Australia moves fast: North-West actually

Australia on globeThis story is about the tectonic plate on which we reside.  Tectonic plates move, and so continents shift over time.  They generally go pretty slow though.

What about Australia?  It appears that every year, we move 11 centimetres West and 7 centimetres North.  For a tectonic plate, that’s very fast.

The last time scientists marked our location on the globe was in 1994, with the Geocentric Datum of Australia 1994 (GDA1994) – generally called GDA94 in geo-spatial tools (such as QGIS).  So that datum came into force 22 years ago.  Since then, we’ve moved an astonishing 1.5 metres!  You may not think much of this, but right now it actually means that if you use a GPS in Australia to get coordinates, and plot it onto a map that doesn’t correct for this, you’re currently going to be off by 1.5 metres.  Depending on what you’re measuring/marking, you’ll appreciate this can be very significant and cause problems.

Bear in mind that, within Australia, GDA94 is not wrong as such, as its coordinates are relative to points within Australia. However, the positioning of Australia in relation to the rest of the globe is now outdated.  Positioning technologies have also improved.  So there’s a new datum planned for Australia, GDA2020.  By the time it comes into force, we’ll have shifted by 1.8 metres relative to GDA94.

We can have some fun with all this:

  • If you stand and stretch both your arms out, the tips of your fingers are about 1.5 metres apart – of course this depends a bit on the length of your arms, but it’ll give you a rough idea.  Now imagine a pipe or cable in the ground at a particular GPS position,  move 1.5 metres.  You could clean miss that pipe or cable… oops!  Unless your GPS is configured to use a datum that gets updated, such as WGS84.  However, if you had the pipe or cable plotted on a map that’s in GDA94, it becomes messy again.
  • If you use a tool such as Google Earth, where is Australia actually?  That is, will a point be plotted accurately, or be 1.5 metres out, or somewhere in between?
    Well, that would depend on when the most recent broad scale photos were taken, and what corrections the Google Earth team possibly applies during processing of its data (for example, Google Earth uses a different datum – WGS 84 for its calculations).
    Interesting question, isn’t it…
  • Now for a little science/maths challenge.  The Northern most tip of Australia, Cape York, is just 150km South of Papua New Guinea (PNG).  Presuming our plate maintains its present course and speed, roughly how many years until the visible bits (above sea level) of Australia and PNG collide?  Post your answer with working/reasoning in a comment to this post!  Think about this carefully and do your research.  Good luck!

Conversations on Collected Health Data

wearable-health-deviceThere are more and more wearable devices that collect a variety of health data, and other health records are kept electronically. More often than not, the people whose data it is don’t actually have access. There are very important issues to consider, and you could use this for a conversation with your students, and in assignments.

On the individual level, questions such as

  • Who should own your health data?
  • Should you be able to get an overview of who has what kind of your data?  (without fuzzy vague language)
  • Should you be able to access your own data? (directly out of a device, or online service where a device sends its data)
  • Should you be able to request a company to completely remove data from their records?

For society, questions like

  • Should a company be allowed to hoard data, or should they be required to make it accessible (open data) for other researchers?

A comment piece in this week’s Nature entitled “Lift the blockade on health data” could be used as a starting point a conversation and for additional information:

http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/535345a

Technology titans, such as Google and Apple, are moving into health. For all the potential benefits, the incorporation of people’s health data into algorithmic ‘black boxes’ could harm science and exacerbate inequalities, warn John Wilbanks and Eric Topol in a Comment piece in this week’s Nature. “When it comes to control over our own data, health data must be where we draw the line,” they stress.

Cryptic digital profiling is already shaping society; for example, online adverts are tailored to people’s age, location, spending and browsing habits. Wilbanks and Topol envision a future in which “companies are able to trade people’s disease profiles, unbeknown to them” and where “health decisions are abstruse and difficult to challenge, and advances in understanding are used to aggressively market health-related services to people — regardless of whether those services actually benefit their health.”

The authors call for a campaigning movement similar to the environmental one to break open how people’s data are being used, and to illuminate how such information could be used in the future. In their view, “the creation of credible competitors that are open source is the most promising way to regulate” corporations that have come to “resemble small nations in their own right”.