soldering | OpenSTEM Pty Ltd

Soldering: if it smells like chicken, you’re holding it wrong!

This T-shirt sums up soldering basics quite well. Funny too. But I hear you say, surely you don’t need to really explain that?
I’d agree, and in our experience with soldering with primary school students in classrooms, we’ve never had any such fuss.

However, in stock photography, we find the following “examples”…

This stock photo model (they appear in many other photos) is holding a hot air gun of a soldering rework station, by the metal part! If the station were turned on, there’d be third degree burns and a distinct nasty smell…

The open hard disk assembly near the front is also quite shiny…..

As if one isn’t enough, here’s another stock photo sample, again held by the metal part:
On a practical level, it’s very unlikely you’d be dealing with a modern computer main board using a regular soldering iron, on the component side.

But what actually annoyed me most about this photo is something else: the original title goes something like “beautiful woman … soldering …”. Relevance? The other photo doesn’t say “hot spunk soldering”, and although that would be just as irrelevant, fact is that with articles and photos of professional women, their appearance is more often than not made a key part of their description. Which is just sexist garbage, bad journalism and bad copy-writing.

Which brings us to this final soldering stock photo sample. Just What The?

Female body selling soldering iron? Come on now. “Bad taste” doesn’t even remotely sum up the wrongness of it all.

Note: the low-res stock photo samples in this article are shown in a satirical fair-use context.

Mirobot v2 Robotics Kits and Soldering Kits Available

The Mirobot v2 logo turtle robotics kits will be here shortly. These are the updated version of the kits we have been using at primary schools (year 4-6) this year in our Robotics and Programming workshops. The new model doesn’t require little pegs any more, the structure now holds itself together with a beautiful designed slot mechanism. Kudos to Ben Pirt for an awesome design!

The robot frames are made of lasercut MDF, and the circuit board is Arduino controlled. All aspects of the design is open and available. The robot can be used to draw, but now also comes with bump sensors and line following capabilities. Communication is through wifi over a raw or web socket. There are a number of programming and control options, from Scratch-style visual systems to a brand new Python library!

By default the v2 comes with a pre-soldered circuit board, but especially for OpenSTEM Ben is offering a non-soldered PCB so we can continue doing the soldering part with classes also. We have found this to be both a great enabler for students, as well as teach that people can build things almost from scratch. But you choose… we keep both the soldered and un-soldered kits. Either way, this is a great project to do with your kids at home, quite a few parents of students that do our workshops also continue in this way.

If you order now, we’ll still be able to include you in the first shipment!

Now for Electronics Soldering! If you or your children want to also do some soldering but don’t have the necessary tools yet, we now have sets available. We assemble our own classroom soldering kits ourselves from a number of sources, as sets found in shops have flimsy or awkward stands. We use a solid steel stand, that also features a wire cleaning ball – this works much better than a wet sponge and it is much easier to maintain. We also include a number of other useful items.

You can order the soldering kit together with a Mirobot kit, or on its own.

Shipping of orders including Mirobots will be in November. This is likely to be our final Mirobot order this side of Christmas, so we do recommend you order now if you want to have the kit available over the holidays.

Press coverage for OpenSTEM Robotics Program at Grovely State School

A journalist and photographer from Brisbane’s North-West News visited Grovely State School, providing this very nice write-up. This is a great acknowledgement of all the work and achievements by the students in the senior classes on electronics soldering, robotics and programming!

It’s been fabulous working with the students and staff at Grovely, and everybody is having a great time – almost forgetting that the OpenSTEM Robotics Program is real curriculum related school work rather than just an incursion experience!

Serendipitously, the Queensland government has recently announced an intention to focus specifically on programming and robotics in education:

“Our goal is to make sure our students are at the cutting edge of innovation through the development of skills to become the technology architects of the digital age,” Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said, “This will include an assessment of coding and computer science, as well as early stage robotics, something I firmly believe should be a part of our education system.”

— ‘Advance Queensland’ package announcement (July 2015)

We’d love to work with your school too, contact us today! We’re currently accepting expressions of interest for the second half of Term 4 (2015) and 2016, and we’re also happy to visit you to meet and discuss your ideas and needs. We love our Robotics Program, but we do much more!

Young Driven Innovator

Kelvin Doe in Sierra Leone. View his story:

I used to hack around with electronics when I was a teen, yes FM transmitters too, but the stuff that Kelvin does is pretty amazing. He clearly has an intrinsic feel for how things work and how he can fit together what he has to make something his community needs.

And I think it’s an awesome example of both learning, as well as on how innovation really works. Innovation is not driven by lots of money, and big corporations. Innovation happens when someone sees a problem, and figures out a (new) solution using the limited resources as their disposal.

Certainly, having some resources can help. But “infinite resources” don’t help good ideas bubble up magically. It’s often a degree of scarcity that makes the idea spark happen!

Finally, it’s a good example of how much young kids can do. It makes no sense for kids to never have touched a soldering iron, and possibly get to use one some time during university (if they go there). What a waste.

There are so many cool projects out there to get started with, and local groups that facilitate this learning and exploration! For instance Gold Coast TechSpace, founded by Steve Dalton and others, does exactly that. Check it out!