Yesterday's sci-fi is today's project for kids

In the 1980's, when I was a child, I liked to make stuff. I wasn't artistic, but I enjoyed hacking away with my computers, bits of old hi-fi and pulling apart gadgets. Most of my creations were non-functioning junk, but to me, the exploration was more enjoyable than the existence of an end product. My more successful projects included networking Atari computers over their joystick ports, a (VERY) basic home-made EEG machine, short-distance UHF television broadcasting (having my computer screen wirelessly in the next room). A generation or so before me, children were making crystal radio receivers.

My career in technology has been shaped by tinkering and curiosity and, now a parent, I can see my daughter starting to follow in my footsteps.

I help out at Young Makers Tech Club, developed by a new social enterprise, Step Into Tech (https://stepintotech.org/). All of the organisation, scheduling, booking and promotion is handled by the ever-resourceful Claire Riseborough (twitter: @c_riseborough) and I kind of tag along, helping the children when they get a bit stuck. The club meets for two hours every other Saturday and has only been running for a few months. The format is simple - come along and play with your own computers or use some of the venue's computers including Raspberry Pis. The club isn't about guided learning, rather than exploration, although we did enter a national competition run by PA Consulting.

https://www.paconsulting.com/events/raspberry-pi-competition/

The aim is for young people to make something, using Raspberry Pi computers, to benefit or improve the lives of people with disabilities. "Our" kids at Step had lots of brilliant ideas but, entering so close to the deadline, we didn't have much time so we had to scale back our ambitions to the least ambitious projects: Neuroplastic cybernetics and autonomous robotics.

The older children chose to make a "bat hat" that uses sonar to detect obstacles and report their proximity back to the wearer through a series of hidden buzzers. Our brains are utterly remarkable. They possess a quality called plasticity - basically, an ability to rewire themselves and make sense of persistent alien signals and integrate them into seemingly-innate perceptive abilities. This is how retinal and cochlear implants work: at first, the data is just crazy noise, but, over time, the brain picks up patterns and associations until eventually it becomes a second nature.

The children aged 12 and under were to design, construct and programme a kind of Roomba for mopping. iRobot spends hundreds of millions of dollars on research and development of Roomba; we had a budget of about ￡50, fewer than a dozen Key Stage 2 kids and maybe 16 hours. Watching these youngsters performing a dry run of their pathing algorithm, pretending to be a robot turning and moving across the room according to precise instructions, really made me think: just a generation ago, these projects would have been cutting-edge research work worthy of any of the world's universities. When I was a child, these kind of ideas would have been reserved for science fiction. And today, children are inventing them for fun on a Saturday afternoon. I can't help but wonder what their children will be creating a decade or two from now.

All pictures courtesy of Claire Riseborough

?https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/claire-riseborough-38160783/