My journey began with a passion for all things music and music production. I play the guitar, piano and sing having played in many bands. I loved learning how to play and eventually master the techniques needed to play. I treated each new lesson as a problem that needed solving and slowly increased my skills. [...]
Nintendo changed the landscape of video games over a decade ago with the revolutionary Wii remote which came bundled with the Wii console. Never before had such a broad span of the population been caught up the world of video game entertainment. The very young, senior citizens, whole families getting together to compete at Wii [...]
Coding - It's not a computer thing, not a techie thing, not a gadgets thing - it's a language thing! Coding essentially involves using languages to perform tasks, to communicate ideas and to express your motivations. More importantly, code is becoming the language which powers all other languages - our thoughts, feelings, emotions are all [...]
During the summer break, we planned a spy activity day to keep some of the younger Steamship crew occupied. The idea was to give them several challenges to complete leading up to one big final challenge to complete the quest. The challenges were all different, some were activity based and others were taxing brain challenges, [...]
The Steamship team were recently invited to take part in Combe Down Primary school’s Sciencefest week. The Brief We were asked to deliver a workshop to a class of key stage 2 children on the subject of science and the outdoors! Thinking back through our previous tinkering sessions we remembered a great project on UV [...]
We recently held a 'making' activity day themed around dragons. Inspired by this topic we decided to explore some new ideas for using the BBC Micro:Bit creatively, developing projects for making and coding in a creative way is at the heart of everything we do here at the STEAMShip. Hic Est Draco - Roar! [...]
I was excited to receive the original Solder: Time watch by Spikenzie Labs as a birthday present and I thought it would make a good project for a steampunk watch. I have been a fan of nixie tube watches for a while, in particular, the ChronodeVFD cyberpunk wristwatch by J. M. De Cristofaro which isn't [...]
As a seasonal challenge I thought I would try to make a light-up Christmas card. I have documented the entire process and challenges I faced along the way. Why don’t you have a go with some paper circuits? The advantage with using a paper based medium for this project is that it [...]
STEM / STEAM are very popular terms at the moment and many toys are being labelled as STEAM toys, but how can you tell which ones will really inspire your little inventor or engineer. We’ve done the hard work for you and chosen our 10 favourite STEAM toys which would make great Christmas presents. [...]
LED Glowies and Throwies are great little lights which you can use as building blocks for all kinds of STEAM projects. A simple LED Glowie consists of an LED and 1 or 2 cell batteries, taped together. To make one you put the positive wire (longer wire) of the LED on the positive + side [...]
