Caedmon College Presents…

Time to Revise!

Our idea… Our first task as a group was to decide on an idea to put forwards into the finals. It was a challenge deciding on one because there were so many good ideas such as a walking stick sensor and point scorer, but these ideas were far from possible as we did not have the resources, money or experience for what we wanted to do. After much deliberation we decided to expand upon our previous idea of making a revision timer. Why? Although it is a simple idea it could change schools and lives for the better. It may have been a challenging task but we think that it’s really something different, new and interesting.

Time to revise… Our product is called “Time to Revise” it plays on the words revision timer and it is also very memorable. We thought that it was the best idea since, as school pupils, we can relate to the stress of school and we wanted to be able to connect to the product. “Time to Revise” is a study timer which times how long you study. It has a 15, 30 and 45 minute timer, after the time is up it will alert you with a buzzer so you can take a break. This is very important as if you don’t take a break your mind will over work and it might prevent you from learning to the best of your ability. Now you understand the basics of our product you might be thinking… “What about phones?” Well, having your phone with you when you revise is one of the worst things to do. It is just too easy to reach over and look at social networking, text your friends or even google the answers! We recommend turning your phone off, and leaving it out of the room, for best results.

Function… Our timer uses a very complicated code but is very simple to use. Press A to make the countdown start from 30 minutes, B to start it at 15 minutes and A and B together to start it from 45 minutes. At the end, the buzzer will sound which means to take a break before starting another subject or carrying on.

Marketing and Costs… Our product is aimed at school pupils aged 12 – 24. We aimed our product at this age group, as we feel that this is a crucial stage in studying for big and small tests that they may do. We also chose this age range as our group is made up of 11 and 12 year olds and this is a product that we ourselves would use. We spent a total of £3.30 extra on the micro:bit. This left us with £6.70 of our £10 budget left. We needed to add 4 wires and a buzzer to complete our idea. Our table with all the costs is on the following slide, our accountant Grace kept this up to date throughout the project.

Costs Item Cost Number of Item Total Buzzer £2.70 1 LED 5mm £0.09 £0.00 LED 8mm £0.13 Crocodile Clips £0.15 4 £0.60 Total spent £3.30 Total left £6.70

Skills used. Our group is very fortunate to be made up of students who have a vast STEM knowledge. Although we all have this knowledge, some of us were better suited to particular areas, so we decided to play off of each others strengths to make our team run smoothly. For example, one of our team has done exceptionally well in STEM subjects but she also has done amazingly well in art and creative subjects so we decided to appoint her to creative leader, she has helped our team a lot. Before the first Faraday challenge our team had hardly met, despite this, our team worked together to the best of our abilities and it astonished us when we got first place. We started talking as friends after that and when we got the email that we were going to the finals we were ecstatic! To prepare we met up every lunch and spent all day Thursday working and preparing for this presentation.

Challenges and Investment… Our team had over come barriers on the Faraday challenge and we were excited to do that again. This time we had different challenges, first we had difficulties with the coding but luckily, our team’s programmer sorted it. Next we were struck with the challenge of creativeness, we felt that it was just to boring so our designer helped add colour and fun into our project. We came across other problems but these our main issues. In the future we would like to hire professionals to create the codes and some money to advance the packaging.

Finally… During the time of working on this we always referred to one quote…

Thank You For Watching.