Recently at the M-Learn Conference in Melbourne, I had the good fortune to meet Jim Plumber, a lecturer in Environment, Conservation and Horticulture from South Australia TAFE.

Jim’s presentation on RFID and his practical application of RFID in learning was one of the conference highlights for me. So it was a real thrill to me when Jim asked about taking back an rfid Learning Table with him to South Australia.

It didn’t take long before I received an email and these photos and an explanation of what he had come up with it. Its called “Ducks and Frogs” and uses rfid Learning Table to help explain to staff and students how a water recycling system works. Each duck or frog sits on a map that represents a part of the water recycling system. If you pick up and scan any of the ducks or frogs, the rfid tags embedded in the toys trigger an instructional video that explains that part of the water recycling process.

Jim noted that the rfid Learning Table was very well received by everyone and he has received a number of requests to demo the technology to other departments.

Thanks Jim for sharing your project!

The ducks and frogs laid out on the map of the water recycling system. The reader can be seen, just to the left of the map.

Some teaching staff give the rfid Learning Table a try.

First thing in the morning courier arrives with some new rfid goodies. Part of running a business like this is we constantly have to try out new ideas, concepts and technologies. I estimate as much as a third of our time and income is reinvested in learning and trialling new ideas and technology.

Today spent time with Andrew (the other NECS developer) doing a Scrum of all our projects and where they are at, as we prepare to wind down for Christmas. Afterwards we reviewed our project task list for the next release of rfid Learning Table and decided to start speccing out the database and feature list for the new Quiz component of rfid Learning Table. Yes if you read the blog, you might get the odd sneak peak at what is in future releases. :)

Did some story boarding and even role playing, as we tried to step through the process that a teacher might go through to create and setup a quiz. Fortunately this process is made a bit easier by the fact we both have a teaching background. Also thought about issues such as the user interface and some rough notes on the database design. One of the challenges is we are drawing up a featurelist they may not be seen by the user for several iterations of LT, but we still have to think about them and accommodate them in the work we do now. By the time we finished we had done about four hours of work on all this, with two brief interruptions for phone calls.

Spent some time near the end thinking about maintenance issues with the new quiz component and how to keep that manageable. With a Micro ISV support issues (and costs) are critical. If we have to do support work, then another project might be delayed. At the very least the family see less of both of us.

Tomorrow we spec out the database in detail and build it.

Finished the normal work day with processing an order and payment for LT, reviewing and answering some email (I do this twice a day) and researching a new drop down category listbox I want to code for another project called Time Trax.

About to finish and get a phone call from our hardware guru Alex Bell, who lets me know that a component from Switzerland we have been waiting on has arrived. Early testing looks promising. We are trying to find a way to cost reduce our desktop high frequency readers, so they are affordable for markets like education. He does advise me that we will probably have to roll our own device drivers for Windows for this to work. I've already played a bit with the hardware with a TTL to Serial adapter so was expecting this. Look at my project list and sigh. Looks like we have to squeeze that development in before mid year to meet our internal deadlines. Discuss some ideas to make the hardware easier and cheaper to pull together and agree to meet and discuss Alex's progress on the weekend.

Post a response on Sue Waters blog about the MLearn Conference and Sue replies. Sue has some excellent resources if you are interested in the web 2.0 world here. Sue is rather obsessed with the internet, even sharing and documenting her obsession with the lolly jar here. Give a quick reply to her and then think about dinner.

After dinner spent another hour or so with my wife (a PT TAFE Teacher) discussing the pros and cons of the database design. She had, as always another perspective on a couple of design issues. I documented them and will need to discuss them with Andrew in the morning.

Saw kids to bed and then updated one of our code tools (ReFactor) which had just been updated by the developers. Checked the readme file and was somewhat relieved to see it was just a maintenance release. In the past month we have had several updates of our coding tools that have mean't I have had to take time out to see what new features and changes were made.

Reviewed some blogs and web sites to see what IT news happenings went on today. Finally decided to make this blog entry and sign off for the day at 11:46pm.

Well a few weeks back I released rfid Learning Table to the wild and was surprised to find that not everyone else’s PC was identical to mine. ;)  Turns out some folks really did buy Vista and install it on their PC. After sitting down and thinking about that for a while, I realised I would have to find out what was going wrong for my newly found Vista customers.

I booted Vista in VMWare’s excellent VMware Workstation and got to testing. The Learning Table Editor worked fine, but for some reason the Player application kept complaining it couldn’t find the multimedia files to play back.

A little more investigation found that Vista had determined the files were user data and media files and had simply changed the physical location and path to where the files were stored on the PC! Now it wasn’t a bad location it put the files in and really, I probably should have put them there in the first place, but I didn’t and instead had them in the same folder as the executable. Vista was doing a good job of redirecting the Editor to look in the new location, but didn’t do the same for the Player and that’s where the fun started for our Vista customers.

So back into the code and after a day and a half of testing the new and improved rfid Learning Table was Vista compatible.

Anyway it was a good lesson and reminder to delve into the world of Vista a bit more and learn what else has changed...