You Make the Rules! and Reprogram the Cube! gave Bristol a taste of creative technology that you don’t trip over every day. Both events were Bristol’s contribution to the global Processing Community Day event with over 100 sister events around the world. Processing is an open source programming language originally designed for artists, but […]
Archive | Learning
SeePilgrims Part1
This is the first of 3 blog posts about my Summer 2015 SeePilgrims interactive installation at a friend’s festival. Part 1 covers the motive and the result – what actually is it? Part 2 describes the components, technicalities and the design process I went through. Part 3 describes the experience of starting, finishing and exhibiting a […]
SeePilgrims Part2
Part 2 – A Semi-Technical Discussion The starting point for SeePilgrims was the Kinect library for Processing, as nicely outlined on Daniel Shiffman’s blog post on Processing and Kinect. As he explains, development of and access to the openNi library was stopped when Apple acquired the technology. This meant I never got very far […]
SeePilgrims Part3
Part 3: Developing SeePilgrims The decision to undertake an installation for the Pilgrims festival was a big one for me, in that the result was always going to be visible to others. Up to this point all my work was done purely for the act of learning, and possibly to submit to a narrow […]
AI that even my flawed human brain can grok – just!
I have undertaken and completed a few MOOC’s now. Most successfully through Coursera, as the format works for me, the institutions, lectureres and materials are really high quality, and the real-time pacing (and pressure) has really motivated me. The subject that has had me stumped is AI – Artificial Intelligence. I started different courses, on […]
Pesky Robots
Musings on a day at the UK and Ireland FLL finals, Loughborough, 1st February 2015 The day starts fast, and stays fast. The Beechen Bots are back at Loughborough University for the FLL UK and Ireland National championships, following success last year that earned them a place in the OEC in Spain. There are 35 […]
Learning How to Learn
Since embarking on my learning journey, I have come up against apparent limits to my own ability to learn new concepts time and again. This is especially true of some of the more tricky and conceptual aspects of coding in a particular language, and the maths required for some of the AI and Machine learning studies, to the […]
Let Learning Happen
This blog post is part of a graded assignment for the Coursera MOOC, Learning How to Learn. As an older student, or lifelong learner, or simply someone stepping out of your normal trade to learn a knew skill, hobby, language, you may feel your mind is not up to the task, or that frequently the […]
Beechen Bots at FLL OEC, Pamplona
So I have already documented my son’s team’s experience of the UK FLL championships in Loughborough this year, and made a post about the inspiring aura of the FLL OEC championships in Pamplona, Spain. I feel I have to describe the emotional journey of the Beechen Bots’ experience in Pamplona. Day 0 I’ll describe the […]
Robots vs Humans at FLL OEC, Pamplona
Robots or Humans? At the Open European Championships of the First Lego League (FLL OEC) in Pamplona Spain last week, it was definitely the young humans in the lead, while the impressive robots took second place. On the face of it, FLL is a competition in… designing and building a Lego Mindstorms robot to perform […]