Introduction
Coming from an fast developing country with a rapidly growing GDP rate, but not the literacy rate to match it, me and my talented colleagues are looking for ways to contribute with innovative distance learning ideas to help the education sector and system as a whole.
As a part of the package, we have decided to come up with a cheap white board on which a tutor or a trainer can do some writing or drawing and those will be captured through sensors and passed on to a laptop/pc to be transmitted through internet to distant places where the light of education has not arrived with its full blessings.
So, in essence what we have is a classroom with a white board, but students present virtually by means of cyber world.
Now, here is the idea which we believe can be a cost-effective solution and has a potential to make an impact not only in our country but any developing countries.
So here it is .....
The White Board
How will it Work?
The main idea behind the board is - there will be a light emitting device (i.e the pen) which will send light signal and the signal will be reflected by a small mirror tainted in certain color to a light sensor, which will pass the signal to a Arduino Micro-Controller device and depending on the color value detected on the light sensor, the position of the pen will be captured. For this we need an array of different colored mirrors (A) in the direction of the X axis and Another set of mirrors (B) along the Y axis.
The Red Marker E in the figure is the Digital Pen/Chalk or whatever you call it, is a light emitting device. As the pen moves across the board, it’s light will fall upon only one of the mirrors in the x axis, and only one of the mirrors in y axis. We have to set the mirror close to the white board boundary walls, and the mirrors will be inside small cylinders so that at a time the pen’s light can be caught by one mirror only along the x axis and by one in the y axis.
The red light will be reflected by a colored mirror, creating a certain color value that will be sent to the light sensor by angling the mirror properly towards the sensor.
Usually when the board does not have a pen writing on it, all the mirrors will be emitting black because that is the color of the other end of the boundary walls of the boards.
So once a red + certain color combination is picked up, for x and y directions, the colors will be passed to an Arudino Micro-Controller which in return will feed the value to a connected laptop/pc.
And the Benefit
The drawings and writings on the board can then be projected in a html5 canvas (or any canvas for that matter) and these will be sent to a distant virtual classroom in a distant village, and slowly but surely the light of education will illuminate.
History
Article Submitted: 10th April, 2015
