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Kids Build Pill Dispenser To Win Raspberry Pi Award
judgecorp writes "The first Raspberry Pi Awards have picked the best projects built by schoolchildren using the Raspberry Pi. The winners included a team of 8 to 11 year olds, who built a door-answering machine for elderly or disabled people, and a team of 12 to 16 year olds, who made an automated pill dispenser for forgetful patients. Other categories included adults, who built a wireless home power consumption system."
That link sucks. Just brief news coverage.
Here are some better references:
http://www.paconsulting.com/events/the-pa-raspberry-pi-competition-winners-announced/
http://www.paconsulting.com/introducing-pas-media-site/releases/a-pill-dispenser-and-an-air-quality-monitor-all-from-a-25-raspberry-pi-21-march-2013/
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
A wireless device that consumes power? What an original invention!
Other categories included adults, who built a wireless home power consumption system."
That's nothing, I've built a whole ton of power consumption systems in my time!
Of course, what the adult winners built was a home power consumption MONITORING system, which is a tiny bit different.
Seriously, these are some good ideas. The young always seem to be open thinkers. Helping save energy, help the old, and the disabled. That's what tech should be for first and foremost. Possibly helping the starving as well.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The average kid might lack the smarts or the interest to do these projects, but there are plenty of individuals in those age groups who are able to come up with stuff like this, design it, then build and program it. It won't following engineering standards, be bug free, and might not even work very well in general, but that's not the point of this competition.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Well, the "thickness" distribution would have to be very odd not to account for some exceptions.
In my opinion, kids aren't much dumber than adults, they just have assimilated less stuff. That can be bad (less useful knowledge) or good (less prejudices).
But in any case, have you tried teaching average adults to program? Because you might start finding difficult to believe that anyone can program ;)
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I find it interresting that the younger the contestants were, the more practically usable their inventions were.
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So has the school of the pill dispenser team suspended them yet under a zero tolerance drug policy?
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Why would you need a Raspberry Pi to build a Pez dispenser?
Congratulations on the ingenuity of the winners!
It is more like a Pez dispenser which will only dispense candy N times a day, where N is programmable through a website, and will alert the user with an alarm and flashing light when the dispenser is ready to dispense another sweet. And even better, will alert a family member via email if the sweet has not been removed from the machine within a reasonable time frame.
Here's the website of the team that built the electric monitor. This is what I care about - not some blurb saying that they won...
http://unop.co.uk/dev/raspberry-pi-electricity-monitor/