Queensland Junior Physics Olympiad 2015

The QLD Junior Physics Olympiad (known to the participants as JPhO) is an annual winter school holiday event at the University of Queensland, this year running in the week of 29 June – 3 July, for year 10 students with an interest in science and mathematics.

Knowing people who have participated, and as a parent, I can say it’s an absolutely awesome program.  I am specifically telling you this now because there appear to be one or two student places still available for this year’s Olympiad!

So, if you’re a parent or teacher of a year 10 student who has an interest in physics, rush to the link and get things sorted with the organisers! You want to be really quick and convincing as officially the closing date for applications was May 1st and the Olympiad is definitely going ahead anyway.

Mirobot v2 on Kickstarter

Once again developed by the awesome Ben Pirt, you can now pre-order version 2 of the Mirobot for delivery in November 2015. Just in time for Christmas!

OpenSTEM uses the Mirobot turtle with students in primary schools doing soldering, assembling and introduction to programming, so we’re very happy to recommend this.

If you want a Mirobot before November and are in Australia, head over to our Mirobot v1 in OpenSTEM web store.

And if you’re interested in our school workshops, please contact us!

BBC gives children mini-computers in Make it Digital scheme | BBC

The BBC has launched its Make it Digital initiative with new hardware for schools and a raft of coding-based content.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31834927

Microbit prototype

This is a wonderful initiative – as I’ve written before, I grew up “next door to the UK” in The Netherlands, we received the BBC1 and BBC2 TV channels, and I managed to cajole my parents into buying be an Acorn BBC computer. It was a real enabler in terms of programming, understanding how computers work, interfacing with electronics, logic design, and much more. It’s awesome that good old BBC is launching something like that again. It shows vision and it’s very worthwhile.

It appears that some of the teaching material and content may be specific to the UK (as in, an Australian student may not connect with the references), but other than that I think it’d be awesome to basically adopt this for use here also. Even with such minor changes required, most of the work has already been done. Why not use it!

Beautiful model Airbus A310 flight

From a 2011 hobby/model show in Germany. Very smooth demo including take-off and landing. Clearly a very light build (see specs below) otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to have it fly so slowly (which makes it awesome).

Of course, I want to see these things autonomous rather than remote controlled 😉

Specs:

  • Type: Airbus A310-200
  • Scale: 1:22
  • Wingspan: 2000 mm
  • Number of Servos: 9
  • Battery: 2s/450mAh (LiPo)
  • Primary Functions: Rudder, Elevator, Flaps, Spoiler, Ailerons via Spoiler, Motors (differential control)
  • Secondary Functions: Retractable Landing Gear, Cabin lighting, Landing lights, Position lights and fin illumination (individually switchable)
  • Weight (RTF) with helium filling: 348g
  • Weight (RTF) with air filling: approx. 390g
  • Max. Speed: approx. 7m/s (equivalent to approx. 300kts scale speed)
  • Landing Speed: approx. 3m/s (equivalent to approx. 130kts scale speed)

 

OpenSTEM Licensing Update

Just a quick note that we’ve updated our site/content Creative Commons license from

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

to

Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Aside from being newer and more generic, we’ve removed the NC (non-commercial) restriction as it’s essentially superfluous given the ShareAlike conditions, and simply a hindrance in many other respects.

For full information on the licenses, please do click through to the Creative Commons license pages for its awesome documentation and very detailed hints on how to best and properly use CC licensed materials.

For more information on the NC modifier, I recommend Erik Möller’s “reasons not to use a Creative Commons -NC license”.

On Pi Day, How Scientists Use This Number | NASA JPL

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4508

The world celebrates the number pi on Pi Day: March 14, 2015 (3/14/15). Here’s how pi is used in science and engineering.

If you like numbers, you will love March 14, 2015. When written as a numerical date, it’s 3/14/15, corresponding to the first five digits of pi (3.1415) — a once-in-a-century coincidence! Pi Day, which would have been the 136th birthday of Albert Einstein, is a great excuse to eat pie, and to appreciate how important the number pi is to math and science.

Pi is the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle. Any time you want to find out the distance around a circle when you have the distance across it, you will need this formula.