A quick write up of the first Organised Atoms workshop kicking off the 2025 season. We have 3 planned this year, funded again by the Royal Society of Chemistry. The second and third workshops will be Fun Palace events.
Despite the preceding and following days being rainy, the weather on the day was sunny and clear. This is absolutely perfect for mineral hunting out on the dumps, as the rain cleans the crystals and makes everything glittery and shiny - and very obvious for picking up.
As the weather was so perfect we spent a long time fosssicking the site for interesting rocks - it actually took us a long time to walk to the main searching area as we kept finding things on the way. One thing we did this time was equip each crystal hunter with paper bags to keep their personal finds in - previously we had buckets for this task which led to people losing precious rocks in the subsequent cleaning activities.
The time we spent searching meant that the rest of the day was slightly compressed - this combined with the good weather meant we didn't get time to do much electronics. I've noticed before that if it's sunny it's all about rock hunting and if it's rainy it's all about making noises. A big improvement over previous years was the ability to print photographs of the crystals we found - meaning the participants had pictures to take home with them (along with all their rocks of course). This decision was made because the prints of crystal photos we had were really popular, and had a tendency of going home with the kids (they asked permission). Some diligent rock hounds also filled out the all-important beige specimen cards that described each mineral they found as well as each photograph.
Things to change for the next two workshops: The printing setup was a bit convoluted, having to use a USB stick to transfer the photos from a Raspberry Pi we were using with the microscope to another Pi attached to the printer. I think I need to set up a network so I can do this directly, particularly if there are more families. The SDCard reader we had didn't work, so I couldn't print photos from the second microscope (which is running with it's own built in screen), this should be an easy fix.
I'd also like to get some musical activities more embedded in the workshop (rather than relying on rain to create the need for inside activities!). This means making our cardboard synths work with less hassle, as the process of wiring them up is quite involved. Next time I plan to set up up the log crystal synth with it's own speaker and a few accompanying analogue synths in the rock lab area, as an easier way in to this side of the project.
