Connect Project

Working with the Life Science Centre and NUSTEM, I helped deliver the Connect Project. In Connect workshops, family groups tinkered with mechanisms, craft materials, servo motors, microcontrollers and code. They were challenged to build an internet-connected mechatronic device – we call them puppets – which exchanges simple mood messages with all the other puppets in the system. In response to those mood messages each puppet performs a routine of movements.

I started the project back in 2019 when I was still employed by the Life Science Centre as lead maker, starting with a prototyping day in November at the University, to see the creations we made have a look here, to the surprise of no-one who knows me the Cat was mine.

Nearly three years later when I first went freelance, helping to deliver the workshops (after the pandemic put everything on hold) was my first job and I got to deliver the workshop in schools and libraries across Newcastle and Northumberland, along with at the Life Science Centre.