This one’s about an event I fell backwards into putting together at my work (Erie County Technical School).
This year, there’s been a push to get into drones and exposing students to them, so 2 weeks before the school year started, after some encouragement from the administration, I crammed and then passed the FAA Part 107 (UAS; unmanned aircraft system) certificate.
After that, the school acquired a batch of “For the Win” Hopper Drones…certainly not the greatest drones, but maybe good for cheap, repairable, exposure. The goal was to get as many students as possible exposed to drones. Anyhow, this all set the backdrop to what this article is about.
The director loved the idea of the drones and wanted me to apply for a grant through PA Mega Event Challenge through Remake Learning Days. I resisted at first because I’d taken on a lot of different challenges through the year in exploring ideas and trying to grow my program/class, but eventually I decided I may as well just submit the application figuring odds were low we’d get it anyhow…I don’t know what the odds were, but we got the grant.
This actually made my heart drop. I had no idea how to put on a mega event, or what we could really even do with just the drones that we had. Fortunately, I teamed up with another member of the staff who has a real gift for networking and putting events together and I at least had someone to bounce ideas off of.
All of this was unfolding as I was having fun with the NFC chips, Codex and the ducks, dinos and anything else I could think of. Naturally, I thought this was an opportunity to try and incorporate my current interests into the event.
I thought about the experience I had recently had at Nintendo World in Universal Studios Epic Universe where you can buy wristbands and interact with different structures in Nintendo world where you collect badges and coins that you can see in the app. I thought, maybe we could do something similar, but much simpler for the event, which would be ECTS hosting 5th and 6th graders to have a number of different experiences. I thought, if we could add points to certain experience stations, then we could give students some kind of artifact they could scan to see how they scored on the day, and how it compared to other students.
This was the catalyst I needed to start putting a plan together with my partner in crime for the event, L.S.
The first thing I needed was “the fob”, something that could hold the chip for the students. After some thought, I thought it’d be cool if students were able to customize it throughout the day. I connected with a student from Drafting and Design to create a 3d printable “fob” that could hold some artifacts students would be creating throughout the day (one being the NFC chip used to see scores).
With Codex, I developed an online application that would allow Art and Design students to log in and work with the visitors to develop personalized logos and then store them with their profile, which would be associated to the NFC chip.
I then developed a page that would lay out the logos so that the students could go to the Drafting and Design lab so they could laser engrave and then cut out the logos in basswood (27mm circles).
Throughout the development and planning for this event, there were several iterations on the laser engraving export page to figure out what worked best. I was continuously amazed with how easy it was to rapidly add and adjust features to meet the needs of the intersecting technologies. We started with exporting logos to word, but just a day before the event I tried adding an SVG export option so that we could specify the circles to be cut as separate objects and simplifying the process for the laser engraving/cut station.
Another station the visitors were going to collect part of the artifact at was at the Advanced Manufacturing lab. There, they were going to make their own custom dog tags. I shared a sample of the dog tag, the NFC chip and the logo expectations with the drafting student and he developed a fob that fit everything perfectly.
One of the major issues I was facing in the planning was that nearly all of this needed to work asynchronously. That is, the order of the station visits could not matter, with the sole exception of the laser engraving had to happen after students visited the logos. Early on, I resolved this by associating all points to the id on the NFC chip and planned to just associate name and logo later on in the day, essentially allowing students to just scan the chip at different stations to earn points, but this was going to require far more NFC scanner/writers that we would be able to get, so we ended up having to come up with a different solution. I jumped on to Codex and added a whole scoring interface for responsible ECTS students to manage at each station as the visitors came through. To make this work, students were put into groups and given participant ids on name tags for quick lookup.
I also needed a desktop application that could be used to write the NFC chips (not natively supported through browsers due to security/hardware access), so I used Codex to create a python app with PyQT5 that could handle the writing as well as other functionality found online.
At this point, the application was written and just in a bit of a maintenance stage. I deployed it to railway with a mongo db, put the update functionality behind a microsoft login, and it just became a matter of scheduling the groups to stations throughout the day (thank god LS handled this!).
The stations of the day included the following:
- Logo Creation with Graphics and Design Lab
- NFC Chip Programming with the Computer Programming Lab
- Chip engraving with Drafting and Design
- Dog tag creation with Advanced Manufacturing
- Drone Piloting with ECTS students (scored event)
- Sphero driving/programming with ECTS students (scored event)
- Circuit creation with IU5 (scored event)
- Model Airplane piloting – simulator used for landing (scored event)
- Enterprise drone exposure with a PennDot representative
The day of the event finally came, and it was AWESOME! The kids all seemed to really enjoy it and I was thrilled at how relatively smooth the whole thing went with the application made to tie it all together. I created a “fob” for myself as a souvenir, but I did not participate in the events because I didn’t want to interfere with the scoring of the visitors.
Overall, this was a great day. I was on the news for it and everything. I definitely did not want to do it when the grant was first awarded to us, but I’m glad we took it on and created something totally new and special. It is, without a doubt, something that would have been way out of scope if it were not for Codex, but with the use of it as the tool that it is, it made creating something so sophisticated very possible and hopefully very special for our visitors. I’m glad we did it.
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