Paignton Library STEM Group – April 2023
The next meeting of the Paignton Library STEM Group is
Date: Saturday 8th April 2023, Time: 11am to 15:00
Hopefully more coding, but also more science stuff, we can carry on looking at some science practical work, perhaps discuss how we can support any GCSE science too.
I will post an update to what is planned in due course, of course ideas & suggestions welcome.
STEM Group Write up
We did get some science experiments completed, mostly Red Cabbage indicator, so we got to test a few solutions to see / confirm if they were acid or alkali.
Some other experiments included:-
I now need to get some more Copper Sulfate.
Has come help from Carolen, who is another library volunteer and a teacher.
We did set out the Lego WeDo, someone did come and looked at this, but I was just too busy with the Chemistry stuff to help much.
Hopefully get some more science done next month on the 8th April.
STEM Group 11/3/2023
At the stem group on Saturday we are going to be looking at Red Cabbage indicator.
I have prepared some solutions we can test, Jess, one of the librarians had prepared some red cabbage indicator for us.
This uses a different preparation method, but the result is the same, a universal indicator.
So we will be undertaking this at Paignton Library, in room 12, as this is more suitable, has sinks, running water etc.
There will be some other science activities going on too.
Paignton Library STEM Group – March 2023
The next meeting of the Paignton Library STEM Group is Saturday 11th March 2023, 11am to 15:00
This months event coincides with British Science Week which runs from 10th to 19th March 2022.
The purpose of the Paignton Library STEM Group is to encourage and support participation in STEM subjects. Our event aims to create a friendly hub for STEM enthusiasts to share, collaborate and learn. Please do bring your personal STEM projects to the event, we would love to see what you are working on.
We should be have a mixed bag of activities. In addition to the usual coding that carries on from Paignton Library Code Club or our own projects.
Links
Due to this being under constant review. Please see Links page
Please see Contact page for how to get in touch.
Home Chemistry 10 – Alcohols Part 2
So further to the previous post. We tried this at the STEM group on 11/2/2023.
So using :
We had to weigh the sugar, a measuring cylinder was used to measure out the water. Yeast comes in 7g packets, so 3 are needed, in fact this dictated how much of the other ingredients were used. These ingredients are in a 1:1:1 ratio in a 250ml conical flash. We could see / hear the bubbles which showed the reaction was taking place.
After about 2 hours the result looked like this
The reaction can be written down as
Glucose/sugar + Water (in presence of enzyme yeast) = Ethanol + Carbon Dioxide
$\ce{C6H12O6 + Yeast + H2O –> 2C2H5OH + 2CO2}$
I have left this securely at the library and will check on it during the week. We can take a look at Code Club on Saturday,
Please note: This activity is NOT designed to teach anyone how to make Alcohol, it is designed to demonstrate the chemical processes involved in fermentation.
Ethanol, can of course be used in other experiments.
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Paignton Library STEM Group – February 2023
The next meeting of the Paignton Library STEM Group is this Saturday 11th February 2023, 11am to 15:00
The purpose of the Paignton Library STEM Group is to encourage and support participation in STEM subjects. Our event aims to create a friendly hub for STEM enthusiasts to share, collaborate and learn. Please do bring your personal STEM projects to the event, we would love to see what you are working on.
Main topic activity this month is :
Paul Nethercott (STEM Ambassador)
We should also have a mixed bag of activities. In addition to the coding that carries on from Paignton Library Code Club or our own projects.
11th Feb is also UN International day of Women and Girls in Science
Links
Please see Contact page for how to get in touch.
Line following robot kit
At the STEM group we have some kits to build a line following robot
So the finished product will look like this.
With a list of tools that are needed, we have (or should have) these.
Along with detailed guide of all the provided parts etc.
Hopefully someone can spend some time building this at a future meeting, you may NEED adult help / supervision for this.
As we have the Civil Engineering talk / activity in February, then March may be a good time to do this.
Nuclear thermal rocket engine
This was posted to fediverse by NASA today, sounds like things are really moving in this area. What a period in history to study STEM and learn the skills to be part of this.
NASA @nasa@social.beachcom.org
We’re partnering with @DARPA to demonstrate a nuclear thermal rocket engine in space. This new engine would allow us to do more science and reach destinations faster—key steps for sending the first crewed mission to Mars. read more
There are opportunities for people in the Uk to be part of this, as it will require world wide expertise to do this.
I am trying to work with Space Careers UK to see if I can get more info on careers in the UK space industry, early days yet.
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Reaching out to try and gain support
I am trying to reach out to people with the view of getting exposure and help for the STEM group. What I would like is to some how promote careers and opportunities in different areas through any of their community engagement programmes.
Updated 17/1/2023
The Space skills alliance are putting me in touch with UK Space Careers UK so we will see what comes from that.
These cover a wide range of academic subjects, which also include computer science as computers are playing a wider role in research esp things like analytics and computer modelling.
I hope that this will provide opportunities for networking at least.
Pokemon editors
At the Stem group on Saturday 14th Jan 2023 we were trying to get a Pokemon sprite editor working under Xebian Linux.
The statement below is my own interpretation of the issue at hand
As this is a MS Windows program, One solution is to try to use WIne (WIne is not an emulator) which is a Windows compatibility layer. The problem at present is we are missing wine mono.
Xebian is based on Debian Sid, this comes with (or seems to) Wine 8. There seems to be specific wine mono packages for this, so Wine version X has a corresponding Winemono package version.
It appears however that from digging around then there is not a version of winemono available for wine 8 as yet. I found a list wine versions and their corresponding wine mono versions, wine 8 is NOT listed yet.
There is info on the Wine 7.6 release here
I have found a how to fix video here, which may or may not be helpful given the above versioning but it may be helpful later
I am reluctant to start downloading and installing anything from other than normal .deb packages, we are storing problems for later. As apt is really good at keeping things maintained as long as apt actually installed it (or this is how I see things)
Installing other stuff is at our own risk, the support teams may not help us ( fully understandable ) .
Even downloading .deb packages and using dpkg comes with risk, I do admit doing this with LibreOffice.
So lets not install software that isn't within the normal system structure.
So for the time being, As these pokemon editors are windows only and should be run on Windows, we are working on installing windows on a laptop for use at the STEM Group.
Once wine IS working programs may or may not run, this is fine as we know that a working wine is part of the system and not added manually.
Note if your debian system using package 7.0 and you download 7.2 from a tar.gz similar archive and install, Then the package deb is updated to 7.2, You may get issues unless you remove the old one first.
We have Godot on the laptop, which is a FULL game development package so there would be a sprite editor in that.
Hopefully we can get this software working under windows. However there no guarantee that anything created in that, can just be dropped in to Godot anyway.