A great session with SamLabs, teaching kids about the Internet-of-Things
Thank you Rose for managing to present to and engage with a room full of very eager young minds! And thank you Stephanie for organising the event at Brompton Library.
SamLabs is a startup funded by Imperial Innovations which makes very cool wireless blocks to teach children about the Internet-of-Things.
Children as young as 7 can connect and programme them to do fun stuff using the intuitive click-and-drag SamLabs app. For most of the 25 odd children there, it was the first time they heard about smart devices and making objects talk to each other, but they took to it like ducks to water!
Here they put together a remote controlled “selfie machine”…
Some of you worked very diligently to create a wind turbine that detects where the wind is blowing from and adjust position accordingly. Pretty incredible really!
Clearly, learning and playing is a recipe for very big smiles all round;
Participation levels were extremely high, this young fellow had to really squeeze in to get his point of view heard;
The main takeaway was that children experienced first hand how IoT is changing what we can do when we connect devices and make them “smart”.
There were lots of ideas that we could not cover in 2 hrs, but they can pursue these ideas at home or at their schools, SamLabs provides a variety of kits which are lovely to play with, and great to learn with ;
Thank you again all who joined us. We hope to be doing more session with the folks at SamLabs, so stay tuned at www.brainiac.club.
