Project goal and motivation

Motivation

I'm Daan Pape, a computer science student and entrepreneur. I'm passionate about electronics and software since I was a little kid. And it's been 3 years since I've made my passion my profession by founding BlueCherry.io and DPTechnics.

While I was on high school I was already building lot's of personal projects, but I've always been missing an effort from the school to promote technology to my fellow students. The best they did was a course in Microsoft Office Word an Access. This was the point where I really decided to change this.

Now a few years later I'm on my way on achieving this. In 2015 the first IoT-course was reached at HoWEST university in Belgium. But this should not be the end of my mission, it's just the beginning.

Through the membership of my company DPTechnics in the Belgian STEM charter I'm establishing a broader education network and learned that kids should learn to know technology and STEM from the age of 10 to get really interested.

Now I have teamed up with HoWEST university and some elementary school teachers to develop this project. This way I can develop all the hardware, software and course material needed for tech enthusiasts between 10 and 25 years old.

As technology becomes ever moreimportant so will the deep understanding off it. Therefore I'm convinced that this project is something that matters, it's a tool that literally helps building the future.

Goal

This project aims to create a truly open source and universal STEM technology and IoT course, ready to use in education and events such as CoderDojo.

To achieve this goal there will be worked on 3 main building blocks:

Hardware: open source hardware needed to complete the course examples.
Software: an easy to use toolchain and IDE, handcrafted especially for STEM education.
Book: an open source LaTex course book containing lot's of info and a pedagogic correct course for IoT. This will be a book which does not require the reader to have any knowledge about the subject.

And finally I want to work together with teachers and schools worldwide to test the course and fine-tune it.

This makes this project the first professional IoT/hardware course material which will be free to use share and adapt.

Partnerships

I'm an engineer and love electronics, software and the two joined together. It's this passion I wan't to share and transfer to the engineers of tomorrow. In my experience this is only possible when a large crowd is reached and if the correct educational approach is applied. Therefore I've been working on partnerships with organisations, schools and teaches to work together. This is the only way the STEM course material will be ready to use and tailor made for future engineers of different ages.

'STEM voor de toekomst' is dutch and means 'STEM for the future' and also 'vote for the future'. This is the official Belgian movement to promote STEM in schools, companies and higher education. DPTechnics has partnered up with this team of entrepreneurs, educators and government organisations to establish 'learning' networks.

HoWEST University is part of the University of Ghent group and has a very reputable Computer Science program. We teamed up with HoWEST to reach out to schools all over the country and develop courses specific for the purpose of STEM. Also HoWEST was the first university in Belgium to implement a practical IoT-course based on the material I have already developed (See my Simon Says project: https://hackaday.io/project/8125-simon-says-with-dpt-board , Object avoiding robot: https://hackaday.io/project/8720-object-avoiding-robot-with-dpt-board).

I'm working on establishing new partnerships across the Belgian border with my partner in our Boston office. More news on this soon. And off course, as this is an open source project, feel free to contribute or maybe if you are a teacher, let's get in touch. That would be great. Only together we can establish a real change in education.

Hardware

Many of the projects available today use pure software (for example MIT scratch) or very expensive (closed source) hardware (for example Lego Mindstorms). The material I'm going to develop here should not be overly expensive to produce, and fully open source. At this point I'm thinking of using:

ESP8266 for low level microcontroller functions. It's very cheap, available everywhere, has arduino libraries and it's ideal to connect various sensors to. If you break one in the process, it's only $1.5, so you can freely experiment.
DPT-Board: a fully open source WiFi enabled linux machine ready to connect stuff to. There's a dual motor controller, 8 mosFET outputs, fully open source software stack and connectivity through USB, Ethernet and WiFi.
A robot platform can be built from materials you have lying around or something cheap with differential steering. I'm planning to use the DPT-Robot as this is what I have lying around.
All the sensors are easily found for a few dollars on the regular channels. But we are working on a cheap and easy delivery channel for schools and education

Software

First things first, the software I'm going to make will be free as in 'open source' and as in 'free beer'. I think no one should pay for there software as sometimes is the case with current courses. I also want all software to work in the browser, the only true cross-platform way. I have already built the first prototype:

It's based on blockly and run's Javascript on the DPT-Board itself. The interpreter is a modified version of http://duktape.org/ You can find the code of all this on my github:

https://github.com/dptechnics/DPT-WEB-IDE-SERV

https://github.com/dptechnics/DPT-JS

https://github.com/dptechnics/DPT-JS-Javascript-sources

https://github.com/dptechnics/DPT-Board-UI/tree/master/webide

It's all very rough prototyping for the moment, but it works. Now I'm working on polishing this.

So yes, the languages this course will focus on are: