Enthusiasts saw technology at play when, by merely touching some fruit connect
to a circuit through wires, they could play music. Even the number of visitors to the
festival was calculated through an interactive survey method, writes Umer Nangiana
Hosting multiple innovative impulses to generate greater interest in the world of science and technology among people, and its application in education in particular; the Katara Learning Festival attracted scores of visitors during the course of its two-week long run.
Families from Qatari and expatriate communities, school and college students, technology enthusiasts and aspiring young scientists swarmed the 100-metre-long interactive space featuring technologies from around the world.
Engaged and attracted through the innovative design of the festival space, the visitors learnt even the most complicated of scientific concepts in the most basic and simplest, yet, fun ways. They are particularly taught how to use technology and incorporate it into education for children.
Organised by jointly by Katara Cultural Complex and World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), the festival practically demonstrated how the feeling of ‘the power to create’ can trigger an interest in children to achieve further excellence and yearn for greater and bigger achievements. On the festival, for instance, they learnt in simple forms how to create basic circuits at home and make gadgets out of them.
They also witnessed technology at play when, by merely touching some fruit connected to a circuit through wires, they could play music. Even the number of visitors to the festival was calculated through an interactive survey method on display at the festival.
“We had people coming in large numbers. I would say that during the weekdays we had 200-300 people a night and then on the weekends around 800-900,” Alizee De Pin, the Maker Manager of the Festival told Community. They were certain about the figures from the data collected by the Domestic Data Streamers (DDS).
It was one of the many ideas on display and besides other applications; it helped counting the number of people visiting the festival space. Explaining the DDS, Pin said it is an installation which is interactive data visualisation. DDS is a team of developers from Spain and two of their members were here surveying the installation, in itself a survey.
“They counted that 150 strings were plucked each night of the opening and they could tell from the traffic that only 20 percent of the people on the festival were using the installation. So it tells us that around 800-900 people were just around the festival on the opening,” said Pin.
What are the strings on the long horizontally place table and how do they work?
One of the ten ideas was the interactive data visualisation by the DDS. It is a team of developers from Barcelona that have taken on the challenge of transforming raw data into interactive systems and experiences.
With a background in new media and interaction, they work to make new data languages between arts, sociology and science.
“What they do is they create a visual survey, so you have graphic survey happening right in front of your eyes because you are also part of it and you collaborate to this piece of work which asks you to answer some questions,” said Pin.
This specific one is about the Internet and use of Internet in the classrooms and education. People are one core string. It is either yellow for students or green for working life. You have a blue for employed and red for others, she said pointing to the installation.
How it works, she explained, is let’s say you are a student and you choose the yellow string and you pass the string through some rings. It is linear so you follow the questions and you pass it through different rings and this makes a path.
“So you have basically different paths of different lines and strings of colours and the results of survey which you can compare with people around you. In the same way you can have the survey of everyone who came to the festival,” added Pin.
Among other more interactive ideas, Pin said, they had different tables, displaying 10 different ideas, most of them themed around coding, programming, electronics, music, playing, sanitising, data collection and processing, etc.
“We gathered some themes and we selected technologies that would teach children in a very simple way how to use technology as an education tool,” said the festival manager.
The exhibition space was designed in such a way that on the outer core of the 100-metre square area were the gallery for photography display images themed around technology and its usage from different parts of the world.
In the middle of these photographic modules, there were demonstration zones with desks featuring technologies with hands-on demonstrations of their working and construction.
“The idea was that people can come from anywhere and get to the centre which is the demo zone. I think people loved it and it was also very easy for us to receive the public. With students volunteering, it helped us to make this festival something where you actually experience and exchange knowledge,” said Pin.
Ten students from Qatar University came and helped us, the organisers, every night. Their job was to explain the concept and mechanism of each idea and details related to it to the visitors.
Every one of the ideas was carefully selected by the organisers and they duly captured the attention of the people, in particular, the children.
One of them was by Makey Makey. Here you could play music on small speakers by touching fruits connected with circuits easily made through simple wires. “You connect any conductive items to the Makey Makey. The items you plug could be a banana, for example, and the banana would just trigger the message on your computer. So basically, you break the chain by using computer and you integrate it into things around you,” said Pin.
There was a Primo-wooden robot as well. It taught children basic programming. “The principle is that you have a map and you create a narrative path. So the robot has to be sent to a mountain so you wonder how I send it to the mountain so you make a path,” explained Pin.
It was a playful physical programming interface that teaches children programming logic without the need for literacy. The goal of the game was to guide Cubetto, the robot, to his destination on the board. It remained a hit among children throughout the festival.
“It was really interesting to see that giving simple tools to the children with very specific colours and shapes, you could make them understand very complicated ideas in a very simple way,” said Pin.
Another popular idea among children was the Littlebits Legos. Electronic Legos, it taught children how to make basic electronic circuits. They had coloured codes for each module. Because these were very simple colours and shapes, children learnt to quickly build things.
The festival also featured workshops with some of the makers of the technologies. The workshop is the exact and perfect moment to zoom in on the technology and see how it effects the children and how they undertake it, control it, master it or don’t, said Pin.
At the workshops, it was very easy to show the children and teach them how to use technology so as to broaden their knowledge.
Pin said some of the school children visited the festival in the morning which proved a minus point for the festival as most of the ideas could not be brought out and placed outdoors in the day-time.
“We wish we could have them by nights during the festival hours because you know in the morning it is hard to bring all the technologies out as some of them are using fruits, screens or printings and we could not show everything up,” said Pin.
Other than that, the festival, she said, was a huge success and it went a long way in achieving its goal. The two-week long festival ended on November 8.
