Microsquad - CERN

CREATIVE HUB/ PARTNER

CERN

Microsquad technology: CERN Project on the Internet of Things

presenting a new coopetition game ‘The detector is You’

Brice Copy, Lucas Van Mol and Elisabeth Blazianu are the authors of a platform to create collaborative educational games mixing physical and virtual worlds.

Games greatly facilitate a learning process and coopetition (an ingenious combination of cooperation and competition) stimulates emulation amongst learners.

Participants are each assigned an on-screen avatar and handed a radio terminal to take part in team activities. Activities can feature votes, rapidity challenges, identification challenges or let their owner express sentiments about the presented contents.

On the technical side, the radio terminal is a low-cost educational programmable controller, supported by the BBC and Lancaster University called a Micro:bit. Thanks to sensors present on board (namely two buttons, an accelerometer and a thermometer), both interactive and environmental data can be captured and collected on a computer or mobile phone. On its small integrated 5x5 pixels screen, the Micro:bit can also present simple icons, or small amounts of scrolling text.

The Micro:bit is not a computer per-say, but it can exchange information with an Internet-connected computer program, a gateway. Our authors called their gateway “Microsquad”, and use it to connect participants’ input directly to a web page and three-dimensional graphical visualizations.

Based on the Microsquad technology, the team issued their first collaborative activity entitled “The detector is YOU”, which initiates an audience to the wonderful world of quantum physics and the elementary particles that compose our universe.

Directly inspired by the scientific teams operating the Large Hadron Collider (the 27-kilometer-long particle accelerator exploited by CERN) and its particle detectors, each participant plays the role of a physicist and is entrusted with a Micro:bit that will act as a make-believe particle sensor : A “virtual” particle is launched, the Micro:bits’ integrated screens present a reading that must be interpreted : combining the readings of multiple sensors is necessary to determine with certainty which type of “virtual” particle just crossed their collective particle detector. Once familiar with the process of particle detection, the audience can be split into competing sub-groups and must reproduce their readings with increasing swiftness to score and win the challenge. MicroSquad is an open-source gateway that connects Microbits to the “Internet of Things” (via the standard MQTT protocol) via their on-board radio module.

Actions and data requests can be sent to individual Microbits or groups of Microbits to support interactive group activities, such as group decision processes (vote), sentiment collection (likes, applause, happy / unhappy) or interactive team games (using buttons or the on-board compass or accelerometer for control)

Microsquad is an open-source platform, reusable freely to implement new activities and in the future, support the creation of interactive coopetitive educational contents.

You can follow this project on Addictlab.com. Register, profile yourself and ask to join the project.

Brice Copy brice.copy@cern.ch CERN Micro Club robotics and outreach manager

#290 MicroSquad - Connecting Microbit to the Web The BBC Microbit is a great educational tool, simple to learn and use, but limited by design in resources. Connecting Microbits to web pages can prove complicated.

Project responsible Cern : Brice Copy Interns: Elisabeth Blazianu Lucas Van Mol