Play – Experience – Learn
The Marine Expedition Sept program is now over! But we’ll be running more programs during the year end holidays, so watch this space for updates, or better still, drop us an email and we’ll notify you when the programs are ready for registration.
You’ve already seen the boats that our participants built, so here’s a photo of a hydraulically controlled panther that was built by another participant.
Music with water and micro:bit!
An explosive end to our electrolysis experiment.
We had a preview run of the Marine Expedition programme for our regular students who couldn’t make it for the Sept camp. One of our students designed and built this trimaran, driven by a centrifugal pump jet and controlled with a micro:bit.
The pump jet is rather under-powered for the size of the boat, but it’s low power demands and easy installation makes it a good choice for use as station keeping or maneuvering thrusters. Other choices for boat propulsions includes propellers, paddle wheels, fans, and many more.
If you would like to join the Marine Expedition programme, there are still a few days left to sign up here. We also do fun and educational stuff like this and more during our regular classes. Contact us to find out more.
Want to know more about the Lego EV3 batteries? Check out our articles on building an EV3 multi-batteries charger and a teardown of the EV3 battery.
When we founded A Posteriori, we wanted to make sure we didn’t lose focus of our previous careers as engineers and software developers. We wanted to stay relevant in both the Commercial industry as well as find a niche in Education.
Besides creating our new STEM education business, developing original curriculum, and teaching at MOE and International Schools, last year we also ground our teeth on a wall-climbing robot, which we exhibited at the Singapore Robotics Games event. We won a Unique Design award for our efforts.
This year we developed and sold a custom-made product to the Ministry of Health’s National Medical Research Council (NMRC) to help with anonymized grant-proposal decision-making events. The product, an Audience Response System (ARS), went live last month and I was extremely proud seeing it used last week. Our clients and their end-users had nothing but praises for our work, and a list of feature enhancements, of course. We look forward to working with the Ministry of Health and the NMRC on other projects in the future.
A Posteriori is not just about LEGOs and Drones.
We intend to continue to make real products, some just for fun or artistic value, and some for creating commercial or scientific value.
And we hope to take our students on some of our Making adventures in our new Mega MakerSpace & STEM Learning Center.
We opened the doors to our new MakerSpace designed for both kids and adults earlier this year. It’s located at the MEGA building in Woodlands, Singapore.
Our first intake of students was brought to us by one of our partners, Yap Kwee Lin, who introduced us in the first place, and is an important part of the origin story of A Posteriori.
The kids took us on a Mission to the Moon, as part of their participation in this year’s FIRST LEGO League Jr event.
We enjoyed creating the unique curriculum blending Science (electrolysis of water, solar-powered electronics), Technology (3D printing, indoor planter), Engineering (WeDo Robotics), and Math (lunar orbit mechanics, and various other problems). We even went on a field trip to observe the night sky at the Galaxy Community Center Observatory.
The kids and their families were super-keen, which made the experience really unique and gratifying.
And, of course, they took great pride in their work and won a trophy for their efforts!
We are hoping to expand our student class of 2019 during the June Holidays.
Our students from Swiss Cottage, Pei Hwa Secondary, and Zhenghua Primary participated in various sub-leagues of the 9th Robocup Singapore Open & Competition this past weekend.
When we teach, there is always a lot of pressure to get the kids on a path to excel. We are happy to help the kids reach their true potential, as long as they’re having fun. The Robocup CoSpace Rescue challenge is built like a game, and so the platform lends itself to a fun-filled curriculum with a built-in drive to success (and win the game!).
The kids showed great aptitude in this league, as they clinched first, second, and sometimes even third places (not officially allowed by competition guidelines) in the various fixtures and age groups. We are looking to establish a more formal partnership with the Robocup league organizers to provide our original curriculum, based on the CoSpace challenge, to more schools in Singapore. And make the 10th Singapore Open a great success next year.
One pet peeve, our secondary school teams who joined the more competitive RCJ league faced major challenges from Junior Colleges, and so the Under 19 category is going to be quite impossible to surmount – and the coveted spot to represent Singapore internationally quite out of reach…
Kudos to element14 for their work on growing their community of makers and educators. I happened on their Great micro:bit Education Giveaway publication while looking for out-of-stock micro:bits packages. I had a compelling story about our work with at-risk youth at Boys’ Town and Muhammadiya Welfare Home, and now we have a bunch of micro:bits we can use to do more good!
We are contacting our non-profit partners to find a good home for the micro:bit Club pack, before the year-end holiday season.
Paying it forward pays back…
Earlier this year our friends at Tinkertanker contacted us with a sort of unsolicited welcome to the Tech Education marketplace. We really appreciated that professional courtesy. And we’ve been collaborating with them on several projects ever since, teaching Secondary level courses like Arduino and Python/Processing.
They also referred us to Camp Asia – a leading holiday camp and extracurricular activity provider run by Cognita, the owner of both Australian and Stamford American International Schools. We built up our relationship with Camp Asia, and now we will be participating more closely with them on their Tech Savvy offerings as their so-called Head Coaches for Creative Coding and Electronic MakerSpace – original curricula curated especially for this collaboration.
Thank you Tinkertanker and Camp Asia for helping us grow and putting your trust in us!
Throughout July and August we delivered our biggest educational program yet – a cohort of ~315 students for 10.5 hours of micro:bit-based, physical computing and making module following a sustainability and innovation contextual arc.
The kids got to explore all sorts of external electronic components, from simple LEDs to water pumps and servos, hygrometers and IR proximity sensors. It was a breadth-first bonanza, but the class sizes (1:40 ratio) and short session durations (1.5 hr) prevented us from really digging down, although at the end the kids were testing their own limits, which was great to see.
I think we could concentrate on something less open-ended and get better student participation rates, sacrificing our own interest and the rare oddballs who are best-suited for a more creative approach.
Kids’ final projects ranged from Bluetooth-powered messaging between multiple micro:bits, proximity-triggered security systems with buzzers and LEDs, and self-watering plants. The sustainability gambit colored all of the work and learning.
It was a labor of love, but boy was it labor. We sourced electrical components, packaged hundreds of kits, created a custom-tailored curriculum, and printed hundreds of personal worksheets & guides. This is about the largest I’d want to get for a while. Any bigger and I think we’d lose a sense of what we’re actually doing.
Earlier this month, we continued to deliver our STEAM in Singapore Schools series of talks during the launch of a new Drone Operators Course at the Sumiran Eco Camp outside Kuching, Sarawak on the Malaysian island of Borneo. Our participation here is due to our informal partnership with a consortium of business and academic interests trying to help revolutionize Palm Oil farming utilizing automation and modern data analytics and agronomic technology.
As STEAM educators and engineers are our role in this venture is yet to be completely clarified, but with the launch of several Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) & Robotics Academies in Borneo and Kuala Lumpur, we may be getting closer to operational requirements for STEAM education and basic Drone flight and controller programming courses.
We look forward to working with Captain Sudhir and his team in the near future.