[phoenix-project] Re: twitter and further
- From: Georges Khaznadar <georges.khaznadar@xxxxxxx>
- To: Nicolas Pettiaux <nicolas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2012 19:51:14 +0200
Hello Nicolas,
I read that you are thinking about probes which are sold by laboratory
hardware makers. As far as I know, such hardware are not designed with the
same idea in mind than the project PHOENIX which has given rise to Expeyes.
PHOENIX means: "Physics with Homemade Equipment & Innovative
Experiments". The kit coming with expeyes is made of various components
whose average price is way lower than $1. The equipment which you
describe below has average prices 100 times bigger.
I do not know the policy for scientific equipment in Belgian schools ;
however in my school, our laboratory has a budget of 25,000 euros per
year to maintain and renew our equipment (for approximately 800 students
learning physics and chemistry, which means approximately 30 euros by
student and by year).
In my opinion, PHOENIX/ExpEyes are projects which enable schools to
manage scientific equipment, like they used to manage schoolbooks: a
phoenix box can be lent for one year, like a schoolbook (for free or at
a moderate expense).
If we want expeyes boxes to be considered seriously by students, they
must be used for regular homework: at least one short experiment to
perform each week. Hopefully, there should be no artificial barrier
between experiments which can be carried out at home and experiments
carried out in the school.
Let us take one example: if I want to assign a howework for my students
about acidity and pH, it must use only very cheap stuff: for example, I
can give them a recipe with red cabbage juice[¹], ask them to watch its
color changes, and then ask them how to automate a measurement with
expeyes and its kit (for example: measuring the attenuation of light
sent by the white LED and filtered by a known blue or red screen, then
filtered by the chemical mixture). After that homework, they will make
similar experiments at school, and at some time they will access
ordinary pH-meters, which cost more than an expeyes box.
With that example in mind, to avoid artifical barriers between homework
and laboratory practice, I should recommend my laboratory chief to buy
pH-meters with an analog output when she has to renew our equipment.
In my opinion, we are not the right persons to develop directly
measurement add-ons for expeyes at industrial scale, and there should
never be such a catalog of "systems designed for expeyes". Either
ExpEyes is free hardware or non-free hardware. If it is free hardware,
it should be usable with any electric device, provided this device was
not designed to create lock-in situations for the client.
So I am thinking that the best thing we can do is to create a web
community sharing good pratices about scientific equipment.
One first approach may be advocating for devices easy to connect with
simple digital and/or analog inputs, and when those devices are
manufactured at a big enough scale, for a foreseable future, gather
documents about them.
These documents can be about their storage, their connection to an
expeyes box, their maintenance, and even a user interface designed as a
*plugin* for expeyes.
Best regards, Georges.
Notes:
[¹] see
http://chemistry.about.com/od/acidsbase1/a/red-cabbage-ph-indicator.htm
Nicolas Pettiaux a écrit :
> Dear
>
> I have tweeted today about the expeyes
>
> One project I would like to see taking off is one we discussed
> Abdulla, Georges and myself in Genève, to develop both the material
> (the connectors) and the software to use all the material, most of the
> time proprietary, one would find in a physics or chemistry teaching
> room, especially the experimental probes, like the one for
> temperature, force, position, speed, acceleration, pH ... measurement
> with the expeyes.
>
> Some, the ones that are actively sold in Belgium, are shown on
> http://defrance.be/fr/Education/Physique/
>
> I suppose Georges has some precise ideas about some materials that
> have already rather standards, but proprietary, connectors in French
> physics labs. Starting with such materials/connetors would rapidly
> help to leverage the expeyes as a good and cheap instrument to use
> these probes ... that would be open, programmable ... some
> characteristics that the current tools are not as much.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Nicolas
>
> PS I must write that I really appreciated to meet Abdulla and Shuba in Geneva.
>
> --
> Nicolas Pettiaux
>
--
Georges KHAZNADAR et Jocelyne FOURNIER
22 rue des mouettes, 59240 Dunkerque France.
Téléphone +33 (0)3 28 29 17 70
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