showing hawaii high school students cool tricks with the wiimote

on friday, february 8, i participated in the College of Engineering High School Engineering Expo. thanks goes out to the supporters of the College of Engineering, the staff, faculty, and engineering students for volunteering their precious time for this event. to help out with this event we put together a demonstration of something kids can relate to - a Wii remote!

we borrowed the idea from johnny lee. johnny, is pretty famous, so if you didn't hear of him yet. you are pretty much out of touch (inside joke: scuba steve is laughing right now). anyway, this dude invented a series of wiimote experiements. its really cool stuff, watch his videos for yourself.

here are some pictures of the stuff we created:





the kids at the expo were really be interested in what we showed them. there were a lot of "cool", "thats crazy", "wow", "i didn't know you could do that", which is great! next time i'll figure how to get the kids to say, "i want to make one my self", "how do i make one", "i'll make one and write software for it".

i think a cool thing to do is get all the infrared LEDs i can and make a hundred pens and send them to the schools. this could be a science fair type thing or it could be a lesson in class. so, basically i want to make a lesson in a box. the box would contain everything a high school teacher needed to use this in the classroom.

it would have:

an already made infrared LED pen

parts for the students to make their own pen (say a couple more pens)

the wiimote software - with instructions on how to set up. for example, add directX to the cd so teachers can install that quickly.

an informative video about how the wiimote works and how the wiimote experiments work.

and more teacher lesson plan stuff. for example a sample lesson plan, homework suggestions, etc.

here are some of the things that i have to figure out.

1) i need to find a clear pen casing of some sort - so the students can see what's inside the pen. something like this would work great.
2) how to get all those parts? in bulk? and from where?
3) who can help me with the teacher lesson plan stuff?
4) getting someone to do the informative video.
5) what are the requirements for getting plans approved for the DOE?

i think this is a fantastic idea that i can actually do to help STEM in hawaii.