BETTing on the future

THE ANNUAL British education technology show BETT, which ended in London last week, is probably Britain's biggest IT show and certainly offers the widest variety of gadgets, ranging from computer-controlled sewing machines to robots.

Stars of the show were 3D printers, which can now be bought for less than the cost of a heavy-duty office laser printer and are capable, given the data, of building up a sculpture of your head layer-by-layer. Technology Supplies showed the £795 (ex Vat) Rapman V3, the latest version of its build-it-yourself model, which can render 3D images at a rate of seven cubic millimetres a second from the STL files supported by most CAD packages.

This model uses plastic frames that are said to make it easier to build. A ready-built version, called the Rapman Pro, costs £1,995. Both paint in 3D using a choice of plastics, in different colours, supplied in 1Kg spools. Higher-end 3D printers, which are used for rapid prototyping of designs, cost up to £30,000.

Texas Instruments (TI) demonstrated a schools version of what it said was the world's first single-beam 3D projector system, which beams left-eye and right-eye images alternately from the same Digital Light Processing (DLP) chip. Special glasses are needed to get the 3D effect. The company says that during the next three months projectors using the system will be offered by Acer, BenQ, Dell, InFocus, Mitsubishi, NEC, Optoma, Sharp, ViewSonic and Vivitek.

Little 3D software and content is available yet so TI describes the system as "3D Ready" but it looks like a promising platform for visualisations.

Relatively new to the show were low-cost USB spectrometers that, as one vendor's representative wryly remarked, can help budding drug dealers learn how to test the purity of their wares. Biology, physics and chemistry teachers use them for rather more reputable classroom activities. Until recently these could cost £1,000 or more but Data Harvest and IDS were both offering models, with software, for a little under £400 and SciChem offered one at £625.

Judging from the number of dataloggers on show, it would appear that students no longer have to tabulate all the results of their experiments laboriously by hand. Also big business are sensors to plug into them. The set-up shown on the left, using sensors from Vernier, is designed to measure how a plant causes oxygen and carbon-dioxide levels to vary over time.

Robots of various shapes and descriptions abounded at BETT, presumably on the basis that they are likely to awaken the interest even of the laziest of pupils. A small company called Q4 Technologies has developed a kit providing computer control of the Robosapiens humanoid robots that have sold in the tens of thousands since they were introduced a couple of years back.

Q4 has replaced its TV-style handheld infra-red controllers with an IR transmitter driven by a PC and the idea is to teach kids to program the device using drag-and-drop commands. Girls are catered for as well as boys with a sister robot called Femisapiens. Chief technology officer Peter Kibble said this has been a great success in primary schools. "The girls can dress it up for a ball and program it to dance," he said.

You can get the kit complete with a robot for around £150. Sadly for people who already have one of the robots, Kibble says he has no immediate plans to sell the PC controller and software separately. "I reckon I could put it on the market for around £60 but I could only get the supplies if I ordered 10,000. That is too much of an investment for me at the moment."

The Q4 kit looked like the cheapest way to get a humanoid robot. Robosavvy was showing a more ambitious project, a £556 (ex VAT) kit for building an 18-servo humanoid robot called a Bioloid, complete with programmable control software.

Education veteran RM was one of many companies offering remote-control vehicles, either to teach robotics or to encourage kids to program them. One it showed off is designed to chase a ball.

And a company called LJ Create brought a new meaning to the world for the term "crash course" with a miniature magnetic-levitation track using technology similar to the Maglev trains of Japan and Germany. Experimenters can use it to investigate matters such as the laws of motion, or as a test bed for different train designs using software that can simulate their ability to withstand crashes.

How much of this stuff will finds its way into schools with budget cuts looming is a question both teachers and suppliers might like answered. Even so it is clear that classroom equipment has come a long way from blackboard and chalk. µ