DIY Wind Tunnel Aims To Educate The Youth

October 1, 2022 by Lewin Day 20 Comments

Typically, when we talk about wind tunnels, we think of the big facilities in use by the aerospace and motorsports industries. However, there’s nothing stopping you building a wind tunnel of your very own, and it may even be easier than you think! [Jude Pullen] has whipped up just such a design with DIY in mind.

Intended for high school Design & Technology (D&T) classes, it uses relatively simple materials construction techniques. The airflow straightener is built out of PVC pipes, and the end boxes built out of cardboard. The transparent walls for observation are created out of acrylic, while a simple fan provides the necessary flow. The desk-sized wind tunnel can then be instrumented with a manometer, tachometer, and anemometer to measure pressure, fan speed, and wind speed. [Jude] also explores experiments that can be run in the wind tunnel, such as working with a small balsa wood glider and measuring the lift it generates with a scale.

[Jude] has a very pragmatic and real-world understanding of such projects, too. He notes the difference between making things to measure, and making them to fit, and highlights the values of both approaches. It’s a much more holistic approach than simply berating students to “do it right” or “do it better” when making things in a D&T class.

Use of a basic wind tunnel is often not taught to engineering students until at least the second or third year of an engineering degree, after all the boring math and static analysis has been dealt with. However, there’s no reason high school physics students can’t understand the physics involved, and they’re more than capable of undertaking such a build. Starting such education early often nets huge benefits for individuals and their eventual careers.

Once you’ve got yourself a wind tunnel, you might want to start thinking about some flow visualization, which gets really exciting.

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Digital Designer Teaches High School

March 15, 2020 by Al Williams 6 Comments

We wish we had met [Mr. Mueller] when we were in high school. After 20 years as a digital design engineer, he decided to teach a digital electronics class at the high school level at LASA high school in Austin, Texas. He’s been doing it for seven years and has made his course material available via Google Docs.

Don’t let the high school level fool you. Topics range from simple electronics to Spice. There’s coverage of discrete devices, oscilloscopes, and Arduinos. There’s plenty of digital logic, of course, and a simple 16-bit microprocessor, too. There are labs for FPGAs using Verilog and talks about ARM. It’s pretty comprehensive and we wonder if they can really cram all this into a single school year. One thing we saw that caught our eye was the simulation of a transistor using Play-Doh. Turns out it isn’t an electrical simulation, but a simulation of how photolithography creates transistors. Still good stuff.

This would be great for teaching students of pretty much any age, even if you took only parts of it. It would also be worthwhile for self-study. We know how much work it takes to put something like this together, and we can’t commend [Mr. Mueller] and the LASA high school enough for making it available to everyone.

There is more and more course material out there at all levels and we think that’s a great thing. If you need something for a younger set, try a blindfold.

Get Your Uni, School Or College Involved In The Hackaday Prize

May 13, 2014 by Jasmine Brackett 3 Comments

We’ve been busy contacting design tech and electrical engineering education departments to tell them about The Hackaday Prize, but there are only so many of us and we could do with your help to get the word out.

Are you excited about The Hackaday Prize? Do you think more people at your school should know about it so they can take part? Either way, please help us help them by emailing prize@hackaday.com to let us know what program coordinators, student group, or other people we should contact. If appropriate, we have a bunch of promotional materials we would like to send out to some of these awesome hackers.

You can also help us by telling your hacker designer friends, posting about The Hackaday Prize on college social media (#HackadayPrize), or letting the student newspaper know. We want to get as many universities, colleges and high schools involved as possible. Many senior year project ideas would make great starting points for THP entries, and we want to make sure students take up this opportunity to show off what they can do (and hopefully win some stuff in the process). This makes a great summer project, and looks great when applying for colleges or jobs in the future.

Remember you have until August to get your entry in, but the sooner you post it on Hackaday Projects, the sooner you can potentially start winning rewards. We have hundreds of tshirts, stickers, patches, posters and other swag up for grabs on the way to winning The Hackaday Prize.

Hackaday Visits The Clark Magnet High School

January 28, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 26 Comments

school

Thought Hackaday’s trip to LA was all about hackerspaces, parties, and rummaging through piles of awesome junk? Nope. We’re also tasked with some community outreach that brought us to the Clark Magnet High School in Glendale, CA.

This isn’t your usual high school. Each year, it accepts around 300 new freshmen (grade 9) from the other high schools in the Glendale district. Selection is done through a lottery system, ensuring it’s not just the kids “on the good side of the tracks” or whose parents are active in the PTA that are selected; about 52% of the students at Clark can be classified as at or below the poverty line.

The curriculum? Instead of stopping at the classical comprehensive high school education, the students at Clark Magnet are focused primarily on the STEM fields. They’re also the home base for Team 696, a FIRST robotics team that has done very well in robotics competitions. A few mentors from JPL and IBM help the students out on their projects, and the head of Clark’s engineering program, [David Black], as well as the principal, were once students themselves.

As far as their engineering program goes, they have a very impressive setup; their workshop features a Haas minimll with a 10-tool carousel, a huge CNC wood router, more than one 3D printer, a small woodshop, a CAD classroom – in short, enough tools to make just about anything. Because Clark Magnet is in sunny California, they’ve been able to get a few grants and build a 358kW peak solar array behind the football field. It’s enough to keep the lights on, and the electric bill down, allowing them to hire an additional teacher or two.

In addition to an impressive engineering/shop class, there’s also an audio and video production suite filled with Mac Pros, cameras, mixing boards and 96 Terabytes of storage. It’s not an exaggeration to say this high school is better equipped than some colleges.

Clark also does some other very interesting stuff outside of class; they’ve launched and recovered high altitude balloons, traveled to elementary schools to play with Lego robots, and some students also have impressive home-built projects they bring in to tinker with. We saw a homebrew quadcopter and a very awesome Mecanum wheel robot that we expect to see in the Hackaday tip line shortly.

Despite how awesome the Clark engineering department is, and how capable the students are, they’ve said the FIRST robotics team has been getting a lot of flak from the rest of the maker community. Apparently some people see an amazing engineering program as a waste of resources. From our short time at Clark, we think nothing could be further from the truth. These students are quickly becoming experts at CAD design and CNC operations. They’re competent embedded programmers and well on their way to becoming awesome engineers. Students who don’t want to build a robot or program firmware get involved in project planning, marketing, and all the rest of the business that goes into running a initiative of this size. It’s a truly awesome program, and I have to say I’m a little bit jealous I didn’t graduate from Clark.

Gallery of pics and two videos below: going over the workshops at Clark and a robot project. Our fanboyism for Clark also demands we link to the (very small and very resonable) Kickstarter the FIRST robotics team is using for their 2014 budget.

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Hacking High School Exams And Foiling Them With Statistics

June 5, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 99 Comments

graph

A few weeks ago, [Debarghya Das] had two friends eagerly awaiting the results of their High School exit exams, the ISC national examination, taken by 65,000 12th graders in India. This exam is vitally important for each student’s future; a few points determines which university will accept you and which will reject you. One of [Debraghya]’s friends was a little anxious about his grade and asked if it was possible to hack into the board of education’s servers to see the grades before they were posted. [Debraghya] did just that, and was able to download the exam records of nearly every student that took the test.. Looking even closer at the data, he also found evidence these grades were changed in some way.

Getting the grades off the CISCE board of education’s servers was very simple; each school has a separate code, and each student is given an individual number. With the simplest javascript magic, [Debraghya] discovered that individual grades could be accessed by pointing a script to /[4 digit school ID]/[3 digit student ID] on the CISCE server. There was absolutely no security here, an impressive oversight indeed.

After writing a small script and running it on a few machines, [Debraghya] had the exam results, names, and national IDs of 65,000 students. Taking a closer look at the data, he plotted all the scores and came up with a very strange-looking graph (seen above). It looked like a hedgehog, when nearly any test with a population this large should be a continuous curve.

[Debraghya] is convinced he’s discovered evidence of grade tampering. Nearly a third of all possible scores aren’t represented in the data, but scores from 94 to 100 are accounted for, making the hedgehog shape of the graph statistically impossible. Of course [Debraghya] only has the raw scores, and doesn’t know exactly how the tests were scored or how they were manipulated. He does know the scores were altered, though, either through normalizing the raw scores or something stranger and more sinister.

While scraping data off an unencrypted server isn’t much of a hack, despite what the news will tell you, we’re awfully impressed with [Debraghya]’s analysis of the data and his ability to blow the whistle and put this data out in the open. Without any information on how these scores were changed, it doesn’t really change anything, and we’ll welcome any speculation in the comments.

Skittles, The Robotic Blimp

October 16, 2009 by James Munns 18 Comments

Blimp 4_0

Funky Shiitake Mushrooms, a high school design team from Fremont, CA, have created a low cost airship they call Skittles the Second. Skittles is a remote control robotic blimp, complete with 4 reversible propellers, wireless video, and 2.4 a GHz remote control. Somewhere between a regular RC blimp and a Predator Drone, Skittles and FSM have managed to gain a large number of awards including winning the Digital Open grand prize. The ship performs amazingly, and can perform a full 360 in just over one second. There is a video after the break.

For the future, the group plans to give the ship autonomous capabilities, in order to avoid losing another drone in strong wind. Fortunately, after that happened to Skittles the first, they were able to hunt it down after it had floated 3 miles down the road. Since they are all high school students under 17, we would say they have a lot of potential. I, for one, welcome our new robotic blimp overlords.

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Visiting The FIRST Robotics Regional This Friday

March 5, 2008 by Will O'Brien 37 Comments

Just a quick heads-up. I’ll be checking out the FIRST robotics competition in Kansas City this friday. It’s a robotics comp between teams of high school students – and the prizes include quite a few scholarships. I know we’ve got some readers who are in the competition. If you see a guy with a Hack-A-Day sweatshirt/T-shirt on, say hi and I might hook you up with some stickers. My day job will be providing real-time video streaming of the event, so feel free to check that out.