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.

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.