Fountaineers is engaging pupils and staff in a primary school as co-designers of an interactive and programmable water fountain. As people pass by, the intelligent fountain will respond to their behaviour in different ways using programs created by children. The fountain might respond to people’s speed and movement, be part of school performances or represent the opinions of pupils. In both its design and use, the fountain will enable children and adults to engage with, and learn from their environment; learn between lessons and across spaces; and take part in a range of collaborative learning experiences.

Team

• Sean McDougall (project originator, Stakeholder Design)
• Tash Lee (Futurelab)
• Laura Shore (Luckwell Primary School)

July 2007 - Building begins!

After a few revisions to the design and a slight change in the location due to the significant slope in the playground we’ve finally reached a fountain design that everyone is happy with and really excited about - despite that inevitable ‘end of term’ feeling. It’s even been given the okay by the health and safety officer! The fountain is going to be built by Springboard Design Partnership who built the Space Signpost in Millennium Square (see www.futurelab.org.uk/projects/space_signpost) and it’s going into construction mode now, so that it will be ready to install at Luckwell in the Autumn term 2007. It’s a steel and wood structure with independently programmable spouts and proximity, sound and pressure sensors as inputs. LEGO Mindstorms NXT will be used as the programming environment for the fountain.

June 2007 - The fountain has met its maker

We haven’t exactly been inundated with fountain builders in response to our request for proposals - largely because of the uniqueness of what we’re trying to build and its complexity - as far as we are aware nobody has yet built a interactive fountain that is programmable by children. However it’s not doom and gloom. Quite the opposite. We have sourced a brilliant potential supplier who we are currently in dialogue with to refine and clarify aspects of the proposed solution. In clarifying the proposal we found that there are aspects of the design that may need to be revisited and features that we may need to compromise on due to budgetary, technical, building regulations or health and safety reasons.

In order to work with the fountaineers to explore these issues and potential compromises we built an ‘actual size’ full scale model of the fountain in the playground. The model was very much a rough prototype built out of whatever we could lay our hands on - tables, chairs, tyres, bit of plastic piping for the spouts and blue paper to represent the water but it gave everyone a much greater sense of its scale and of how it might feel to sit by it, interact with it and play with it.

Each year group spent half an hour with our fountain expert Mark and the table and chairs fountain, asking questions, considering alternatives and making important decisions about the number of spouts, the orientation of the fountain, and the positioning of sensors. Each class then worked together to come up with a series of questions they wanted to ask. Some examples included ‘Could the tiers be arranged at different heights for different age groups?’ ‘Can there be drains to take any spilled water back to the fountain?’ and ‘We’d like to decorate the outside of it. What could we use?’ These were then presented to and answered by Mark in an open forum and fed into the ongoing development of the design specification.

May 2007 - The fountain is not ready yet but the fish need looking after

While we are waiting on proposals to come back from fountain build companies, the staff and children are working together to work out what sorts of things they need to prepare and work out for when the fountain is in place - e.g. ensuring that the water is safe, focussing on how to program it, deciding how it will be managed and organised so that everyone isn’t trying to use it simultaneously etc.

We wanted to give the children an opportunity to try out these sorts of tasks for real and to give them something tangible around which they could make collective decisions, negotiate and project manage in preparation for the fountain’s arrival. Way back in September when we got the children to show us around their school and then come up with different ways of improving certain areas the most popular idea by far was for an aquarium in the main hall. So we thought a fish tank could work on two counts. As a thank-you present for everyone’s commitment to the project to date and as a water- based artefact that needs looking after, care and maintenance. The fish tank was presented to the school in assembly last week - and this week the classes are working together to figure out what they need to know, learn, answer and consider before setting up the fish tank and buying the fish.

May 2007 - Drawbot Art

Fired up by the now legendary ‘Drawbot Day’ Year 6 have constructed a whole set of new drawing robots and experimented with different sorts of ‘feet’ - sponges, paintbrushes, biros and felt tip pens. They’ve also tried out alternative robot designs with varying numbers of legs to create some really unique pieces of art that they exhibited as part of the South bank Bristol Arts Trail.

The last three weeks have seen the children designing their ideal fountains and then discussing, choosing, voting, commenting and combining ideas to whittle down the choices from 200+ fountain designs to a shortlist of 21 (three from each class). Using these 21 designs as a starting point we employed a product designer to produce a set of five alternative fountain illustrations, which encapsulated the children’s ideas from their drawings and other ideas and input over the whole design process. The fountaineers then worked in small teams to review and evaluate these designs and then feedback with comments for changes and amendments. One year 6 pupil commented that ‘people were much less arrogant now’ and had learned how to listen to other people and take on board each other’s ideas.

Out of this process, three designs emerged as the most popular, two of which were very similar. All of the comments were taken into consideration and where possible incorporated into two new final concept designs. The fountaineers decided the best way to determine which was the most popular was to have a vote - there was a clear favourite with 70% of the votes. The Futurelab team then took this concept along with other information the fountaineers had provided about sensors and spouts and the location and decoration of the fountain to develop a brief to send out to potential suppliers.

March 2007 - Puddles in the main hall

This week Mark Hildred, fountain expert, has been in school to help the staff and children make some decisions about their fountain. The current deliberations are around whether to have a fixed fountain in the school playground, or to make the fountain mobile - so that it can be placed in different locations around the school inside and out. Mark built a prototype fountain out of a paddling pool and a pump and some interchangeable spouts and control inputs. Through this practical demonstration we learned that in order to have fairly high jets of water, a large pool or ‘catch area’ is required to be able to contain the water when it comes back down. As a mobile fountain would need to be able to go through doors inside the school, this necessarily limited the size of the catch area and of the jets (height and number of) as well as creating a lot of mopping up (which wasn’t very popular) and this realisation heavily influenced the fountaineers’ decision to have a fixed fountain outside in the playground.

There were also hands-on activities for children to experience different types of inputs such as proximity and pressure sensors and see - for real - how different spouts created different shapes of water. This day really cemented all the work that the school had done to date and turned the fountain as an abstract idea into a real, live - and wet thing that was actually going to be built at Luckwell school. Everyone was very excited.

March 2007 - Google SketchedUp

In the first week of March we came across Google SketchUp and thought it would be a good tool for the children to use for designing their fountains. We emailed the link over to the head teacher and he showed it to a group of 10 year-old ICT guides from year 5. They had a play around with the software and then that evening some of them downloaded it at home and came back into school with a few 3D models that they’d created; they introduced the software with their classmates and between them worked out how to use it. When the first round of design sketches came in from the external designer it seemed like only five minutes until each of these had been ‘SketchUpped’ so that the fountaineers could analyse the designs from different perspectives before making their comments.

In the midst of the design process - in which we were turning 200 fountain designs into one through an iterative loop of voting, feedback and amendments involving the entire school (see above) - the four year 5 ICT guides asked if they could organise an assembly to show the rest of the KS2 pupils how to use the Google SketchUp software. They worked together as a team to prepare, rehearse and deliver this - and did a brilliant job to a rapt audience of 110 7- 11 year olds, many of whom went home that evening and downloaded the software to have a go themselves. Google SketchUp is a free 3D design tool, developed for the conceptual stages of design. See: http://www.sketchup.com/ for info.

February 2007 - TALK Fountaineering & the DrawBot Challenge

As part of Luckwell’s already established TALK (Thinking and Applying Learning Kinaesthetically) sessions - the entire week from 12-16 February was dedicated to Fountaineering. The aims of the week were to start to make more concrete decisions ultimately deciding on shortlist of locations for the fountain; to give children opportunities to express their visions for the interactivity of the fountain and to get the pupils to physically build something that they test, refine and rebuild through a series of iterations.

We started the week with a planning day with staff - refining plans and testing out activities for the week ahead. This was followed by an evaluation of all of the potential locations by the children - based on criteria that they’d developed. On the afternoon of the second day, Mark Hildred, fountain expert, brought the idea of an intelligent fountain to life for the pupils with his presentation on mobile and interactive fountains and lively, amusing demonstrations of sensors and a variety of inputs and outputs. On day three, fired up from the presentation, the children worked in small groups to plan and create a comic strip that showed a day in the life of the fountain and how it interacted with the world and people around it. These featured an array of characters and visitors including Tony Blair!

The week culminated in the DrawBot Challenge. DrawBots are simple paper cup robots consisting of a cup, felt pens, a motor and some batteries (originated by Jonah Brucker-Cohen - http://www.artbots.org/2004/participants/DrawBot).

Children worked in small mixed aged groups of 4 or 5 to design, build, test, refine and decorate their DrawBots - they were given written instructions but these were only given a cursory glance in most cases. Instead, teams worked together to suggest design ideas, solve problems and shared ideas between groups such as wrapping Sellotape round the battery to make it easier to get in and out – which once conceived, spread round the classrooms like wild fire. One Yr6 pupil went a step further and added a simple switch to avoid the need to remove the battery at all. There was lots of experimentation with additional pens, multiple cups, position of motors etc. Once built, all 208 pupils gathered together with the 50 or so bots which were let loose on a giant piece of paper to basically see what happened. Of the DrawBots that stayed upright, they mostly created circular shapes and spirals reminiscent of Spirograph drawings.

Children were then invited to set a challenge. ‘Make them draw in a straight line’ offered one year 5 boy. The gauntlet had been thrown. The teams were off. For the 20 minutes available there was a hive of activity with teams trying out different strategies to make their bot travel in a straight line - adding weight with Blu-tac, changing the number of legs (pens), moving the position of the motor etc. Back in the hall it would’ve been difficult to claim that there were any completely straight lines - by its very nature the DrawBot is pretty random - but the pupils had made changes to their designs to meet a specific brief (which is what they’re going to need to do with their fountain designs) and learnt a lot about design, prototyping, problem solving, negotiation, collaboration and teamwork along the way.

January 2007 - ‘The Big Squirt’ and ‘Roboteers’

Three months into the fountain design process and the children have done a lot of talking, drawing, dancing and model making and there has been some great work, ideas and dialogue about what the fountain might look like and quite superficially, what it might do. Over the Christmas break we asked pupils to think more specifically about how the fountain might react to the people and to the environment around it. If the fountain had eyes, if it could see and hear and feel - what sorts of things could it do…? As Sean McDougall from Stakeholder Design has suggested we need to start getting the pupils to move from thinking about the fountain as something that can ‘act’ in a pre-programmed, choreographed manner, to something that can ‘react’ to things and perhaps more interestingly ‘interact’ in potentially quite complex ways…

Over Christmas a significant proportion of the children did create diagrams and models of the fountain but it was apparent from their work that they didn’t yet have the understanding or the experience to think laterally about different uses for the fountain - they’re still only seeing it as something that can ‘act’. Something else that was lacking in their experiences was that very few of the children had any ideas about how water might be propelled. As Keith Johnson, head teacher, put it “As teachers we’re forever trying to stop children propelling things”, propulsion is not something that kids generally get to try out at school - especially if it involves water!

So January has seen the children at Luckwell doing things, experiencing things for real, touching and manipulating and seeing actual ‘in the flesh’ results. ‘The big squirt’ got the kids out in the playground in wet water gear with squeezy bottles, water pistols and sprinklers to experiment for themselves with different ways of propelling water. See the school’s website for more info and pictures… ‘Roboteers’ brought together a small team of pupils from years 3-6 with Hans and Graham from Futurelab to experiment with a LEGO Mindstorms robot and to investigate how the different sensors reacted to different inputs. Since their induction this core team have been teaching their classmates how to program the robot and there are plans to send it ‘on tour’ to visit each of the classrooms and let the children discover for themselves - if they are interested - how and what it reacts to and why.

November 2006 - Fountaineering INSET day

Sean McDougall from Stakeholder Design facilitated this half day session at Futurelab where we got the teaching staff to think about the Fountaineers project and share their visions, hopes and concerns. Sean opened the session by getting the teachers to think about the project as a kind of journey. He considered three alternatives:

1. A trip to the Moon. Is this a one-off mega project? What happens if anything goes wrong along the way? Can we improvise? How do we make sure it is safe before we try it out?

2. A five year mission to explore strange new galaxies and civilisations. Are we truly heading into the unknown? What do we need to take with us? What is our time limit? Can we improvise and learn as we go? What happens if things go wrong?

3. The first trip to the North Pole. Can we learn from others? Can we practice before we go? Will it be a disaster if anything goes wrong?

In the end, people were happiest with the idea of the polar explorer. “We are going somewhere where no-one else has ever been. We need to learn lessons as we go, and harness that knowledge to ever better attempts at success. We need to become pragmatists, equipped for the foreseeable but able to improvise using things we find as we go. Above all, we need to hold onto the idea that the process of discovery is chaotic, but those who follow in our steps will be able to take a more direct path”.

October 2006 - Two whole days of mixed age collaboration

The Fountaineering team has just spent two days working together at Luckwell Primary School to begin the design process for the intelligent fountain.Exploratory workshops involved all of the 208 pupils working in 14 groups of mixed up ages (5-11 year olds), 14 teaching staff, Sean from Stakeholder Design and 8 Futurelabbers.

Day one saw the children acting as “super-sleuths” taking the adults on a tour of the school telling their stories and identifying what different locations around the school meant to them. In the afternoon the children created a giant mural - which completely covered the walls of the sports hall - showing things they liked and things they would change about the school. All the pupils then had opportunities to comment on each others’ suggestions and we were able to draw out some key values of importance to them.

On day two children investigated the pluses, minuses and interesting points of having a programmable fountain at school and began to externalise their ideas in diagrams, drawings, poetry, dance and digital art.

Some of the key messages that came out of their work were that they want their fountain to “represent the school”, to be “owned by everybody”, to be “safe and vandal proof”, “creative, cool, colourful and changeable”, “environmentally responsible” and “fun to make”.