"Ohhhhhh how cute" - My happy exclamation caught my colleagues ear and she swiftly responded - "OK Sidsel, you might as well show me - what hardware landed on your desk today?" - I giggled - she know me way to well, to know that "cute" in my world means small nifty hardware and not fluffy "Hello Kitty"- stuff.
I promptly showed her the 4 small GPS units from US GlobalSat (SiRF StarIII - EM406A) which I plan to mount on my SunSPOTs. I chose this particular unit, because its been used successfully with the SunSPOT before.
On January 30th the University of Copenhagen is hosting a High School Teachers Inspiration Day, with lots of info about how the teachers can use and incorporate knowledge from the university in their teachings. The afternoon is spent in different 3 hour workshops of which I will participate in the one entitled "Outdoor life".
Showing Computer Science to non-computer scientists can some times be a bit tricky, since most of what we do include thinking and sitting behind a screen and code stuff that people mostly don't see directly - (unless you are a game developer of course). But here the SunSPOTs come in handy. You place a SunSPOT in peoples hands and suddenly they can walk around with an application that respond to the environment, or in this case their position and movement - pervasive computing at its best.
Once they get within range of the base station it will plot their route through the north campus on Google Maps - at least thats the plan - it's not working yet. The Gym teachers can measure the distance they've walked, the Geography teachers can talk about longitude and latitude and perhaps time zones and The CS teachers (if there are any attending the workshop) can talk about the Global Positioning System (GPS) and fx. decoding of the NMEA format. If there are any Danish teachers they might discuss "the ethics of the surveillence society".
I have yet to figure out what to tell the Chemistry teachers though 
If you have any ideas, I'll appreciate your input.