The Tinusaur Project is an educational platform that provides students, teachers, and makers with the tools to learn, teach and make things. We’ve been developing this since 2013 and it started because we needed such tools for our own courses. It is now used in a few schools and universities, both private and government in Bulgaria. The education, whether formal or informal, has always been the focus of the Tinusaur. Naturally, the BETT Show in London is one of the most interesting events of the year in that field.
The BETT Show is an annual trade show focused on innovations and technology in education. It takes place in London, United Kingdom, and started in 1985.
The Tinusaur team is at the BETT Show, of course, for the second time and it is great here!
What you immediately notice is that everyone has some sort of a robot – a car that you could control to make movements based on an algorithm, or a human-like stumping robot. And those who don’t have a robot – have at least a snapping blocks with electronics like LEDs, motors, servos, etc. that you could program with a Scratch-like environment. This sort of toys becomes a standard for education in electronics, robotics, and programming.
To us, this is a bit disconcerting. Most of those products turn education into a game or playing. Gamification is not just creating a game with which you might (or might no) learn something. It is rather implying the using of game-design elements to improve the process of learning without compromising the process of acquiring knowledge. Another concern that we have is that once you’re done with the playing and you have accomplished the task part of the educational toy you have to put it away and that’s it – you cannot use it to create something useful and practical.
We, at Tinusaur, are trying to avoid the downgrading of the educational part. That is why our kits may look a bit difficult and tedious at first. For the same reason, we decided to focus on C language programming, instead of some other scripting language.
Another thing we’re trying to do is make the kits equally good for learning and making. We think this is what makes us different. Our goal, from the very beginning, has been to create a platform where everything you learn and create could be used at a later point for something real, useful and practical. And over the years we found out that students really appreciate that.
The Tinusaur OLED Display Kit is a very good example for that.
- You learn how to solder and assemble the boards and the modules.
- You learn how to program the microcontroller, read the sensor data and visualize it on the display.
- You could later use the boards and optionally add other sensors and create something that you could use at home.
- Your imagination is the limit.
We have just launched a crowdfunding campaign for the Tinusaur OLED Kit.
Help us start the production of the Tinusaur OLED boards. Go get your own Tinusaur OLED Kit.