Design and Deployment of a Solar-Powered Outdoor Teaching Device

This workshop is an experiment in an unexplored realm of outdoor online teaching (OOT). During the workshop, the teacher will physically interact with each student group for only one hour a day. At other times, he will be in peripatetic, i.e., walking, transiting to other student groups while still being in contact with everyone using a device designed for the seminar.

This device, based on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module technology, will be powered solely by solar energy and use an electrophoretic (e-ink) display for communication of visual content from students to the teacher. The emphasis, however, will be put on communication using spoken, versed, or chanted words, codes, and algorithms.

In the meantime, each student group accompanied by one student assistant will try to create a more developed replica of the teaching artifact. To attain that goal, students will extend and perfect their skills and knowledge in collaborative making (f.e., PCB printing, soldering, laser-cutting, 3D printing), programming embedded systems, network communication, encryption, programming, and collaborative work.

REQUIREMENTS

• At least intermediate knowledge in at least one of the following: making (laser cutting, 3D printing, PCB design, soldering), Linux, Raspberry Pi, e-ink technologies, WebSockets, HTTP, and Matrix protocols and/or Python programming language.
• Basic material (Raspberry Pi compute module, e-ink display, 3G/4G & LTE modem) for each student group will be provided by the teacher.

SCHEDULE

Day 1: Introduction (2+3 hours)
Day 2: Making (3+3 hours)
Day 3: Coding (3+3 hours)
Day 4: Connecting (3+2 hours)

Prof. Dr. Daniel Hromada works as a professor for Digital Education at the Einstein Center Digital Future since August 2018. Born in 1982 in Bratislava, he holds bachelor's degrees in Humanities from Charles University (Prague) and Linguistics from University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis; Master's degree in Artificial and Natural Cognition from École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris). In the majority of his publications, Daniel Hromada addresses topics as diverse as natural language processing, developmental linguistics, computer vision, semantic vector spaces, machine learning, evolutionary computation, computational rhetoric, narrative enrichment, robot ethics, and machine morality. Nikoloz Kapanadze, Robert Schnüll, and Paul Seidler will assist him.