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Equipping teachers with optoelectronics kits
Timeline: 2007-present (on-going)
Client: Rank Prize Funds
Value: £200k+
Aim: Work with teaching professionals to develop a completely original, exciting and up-to-date science kit for classrooms across the country and abroad. To develop a kit that will be functional and intuitive to use by non-physics teachers and that will help young people learn about the physics they see around them everyday as opposed to cathode ray-tubes and filament bulbs!
What we did: The project has evolved since the beginning but FifeX was asked to come up with ideas and help the team to work out what was affordable and practical. In the end, FifeX designed the key components in the kit and developed the ideas right through to production which we now oversee.It has been a unique opportunity to design a product and then watch it evolve and improve as people use it and test it and have ideas about it. The products we have now are great bits of kit that will hopefully have lives well beyond this current project.With over a third of Scottish schools having at least one of the kits, and over two hundred in England in a similar position, the College now seeks a major sponsor to help continue the quest of equipping every school in the country.
Testimonial: "FifeX have been involved in the college since it began. They helped plan the pilot and have been instrumental in interactively designing and supplying kits for novel experiments on solar cells, on colour vision and flat panel displays and on LED light sources and optical fibres. These include a number items of equipment, which they created specially for the college and which had never existed before. Their unique combination of knowledge, skill, experience and contacts proved critical in accomplishing this and will continue to be so as the pilot further evolves and is assessed for further rollout. They have been a pleasure to deal with and have approached each aspect with flexibility and an outstanding commitment to getting it done well."
Prof I. Shanks FRS, FREng, FRSE
External Link to Client's Website: http://www.opto.org.uk