The fountain is working!

Over the last couple of days I've been down in Bristol on what is probably my last trip to work on the Interactive Fountain at Luckwell Primary School. This has been a great project and involved working with the children at the school on the ideas and design of the fountain.



My job this time was to present the final, installed fountain to the children and show them what it could do. Obviously this involved lots of getting wet (in part due to a few impromptu thunderstorms) and some very loud shouting. I think my voice will need a few days to recover!

My thanks to everyone at the school for making me feel so welcome.

Fountain update visit

I visited Bristol today to visit the workshops where the interactive fountain is being created for Luckwell School. The main structure is now in place and the day centred around testing and setting up some of the sensor systems.

I'm aiming to return to Bristol in a couple of weeks to work with the fountain onsite at the school.

Fountaineers Workshop

Last Monday and Tuesday (15th & 16th October) I spent all day at Luckwell Primary School in Bristol as part of the Futurelab Fountaineers Project.

I was invited by Futurelab to follow up sessions I carried out earlier in the year, where I worked with the children on their design for an interactive fountain. As the projects 'fountain expert' I've been answering questions and help the children shape the ideas for what the fountain might look like, where it will be sighted and what it will do.

The fountain is now under construction by a local firm in Bristol and is due to go into the school during December. Since my last visit in the Summer term, the fountain has changed design and position. There has also been a long break for the Summer holidays and the beginning of the new school year.

This visit formed part of the schools 'Talk' week, with the emphasis being on reminding the children about the fountain and getting them engaged with the project. Other experts from Futurelab came into the school to cover maintenance and programming of the fountain witgh the older years. My work was with years 2,3,4 and 5, running a basic refresher course and getting some actual water jets running again.

I used a beta test version of the new Apollo Controller software, to link a number of pressure pads and sensors to a couple of water jets (via a DMX dimmer pack). By programming various scenarios into the Apollo, I was able to demonstrate the various behaviours the fountain might have. Specifically ACT, REACT and INTERACT.

The workshops went well and we all seemed to have a good time. My thanks go to Rose who helped me with all the sessions.

Building a fountain

Today was spent in sunny Bristol building and playing with a mock-up of the fountain at Luckwell School.

Together with Graham and Tash from Futurelab, we built a full-scale mock-up of the fountain using anything we could find. This generally consisted of tables, chairs, coloured paper and plastic tubing.

I worked with each year group to then make decisions about the fountain and ensure that it was still going to be enthusiastically received by the school.

You can track the overall progress of the fountain on the Fountaineers Blog.

New role as Fountain Expert

Today I visited Bristol to join the Fountaineers Project as their 'Fountain' expert. Fountaineers is a Futurelab Project to design and build an interactive fountain - a collaboration with the children and staff at the school. Over the next nine months the school will be designing their own fountain to be built somewhere on site. My job is to help guide them!


Today was an introductory session where I went over some of the interactive fountains I have build before. We looked at the progression from initial ideas through technical drawings to the final fountain. I think this was the first time the children had seen that interactive foutains can actually be built.

To get over the idea of control I used some sensors and a prototype of the Apollo Controller. The sensors were linked to simple sounds, MIDI scales and lights. This enabled me to demonstrate simple cause and effect.

I've got to admit that the original plan was to work with small groups, but I ended up doing an assembly for the whole school. Great fun!

The idea is for me to act as a consultant for the project, visiting throughout the year and carrying out a number of workshops.