Building Connected Classrooms
Outside of running the mobile and web applications team at Lab651, I teach a graduate-level course on the Internet of Things at the University of Saint Thomas. I have had the opportunity to experience situations where I wished that I was omniscient; able to see, hear and know all in the classroom. Therefore, when Wildflower Schools came to us with the concept of being able to observe interactions between students, their teachers, and the educational materials in the tradition of the Montessori approach, we jumped at the opportunity!
Based on a prototype developed by Nazmus Saquib and others at the MIT Media Lab, our team at Lab651 worked with Wildflower Schools to build the physical trays, plastic enclosures, printed circuit boards, embedded software, and mobile application to aggregate location data in the classroom and send it to an analytics platform. It was a great example of how Lab651 has the engineering capability to create smart, connected products for our clients.
Wildflower Schools has posted an update on the project and will be sharing progress as the project moves forward. Building connected things are just the beginning of what is possible and we are excited at the opportunity to work with Wildflower Schools as they begin to capture data that will make a difference in the way students learn in the classroom. Connecting the Physical World to the Digital Universe is our focus at Lab651.