Holy Family BNS Askea Carlow

Ericsson Science Project 2012

No More Paper Money-Near Field Communication-

Category: Energy and Forces-Environmental Awareness

5th Class

Mentors: Mr. FarrellMr. Cole and Ms. Mullally

Selection of Project

September 2011: As a Science and Maths school of Excellence, we decided to enter some science exhibitions this year. The first exhibition we considered was the Young Scientists Exhibition in the RDS. We selected this exhibition as one of the boys dads works for BT and they sponsor the Young Scientist. We also decided to enter the Ericsson Science Competition also as it would have a section in Carlow.In early October we had an open class discussion about what we could enter. Mr. Farrell, learning support teacher, had run a previous project online. We decided to revamp an old project from the school’s first website. It involved using digital money i.e. a credit card to prevent shops selling cigarettes to children. This previous project asked the question, would it be a good idea if all cigarettes were to be purchased using only a credit card. See http://www.iol.ie/~askeabns/poll.htm That was in 2001.

We had a few class discussions on digital money. We asked the question-“What if all money was digital ?” We discussed how it would work and what the implications would be if there was no more paper money.There was a lot of debate about security and how it would work. The discussions with both fifth classes generated a lot of interest. We decided to submit a basic proposal to the selection committee for the Young Scientist Exhibition.

Submitted Project Outline.Our proposal was in two parts.

A:Digital Money. How would it work?B:What would be the implications if all money were digital.

Running Project,November 2011

Great news. Our project “No More Paper Money” was selected for inclusion in the RDS Young Scientist Show. We felt this was an interesting project. We also thought it would be a good submission for the Ericsson Science Competition as it would cover the Energy and Forces.Request for volunteers. Overwhelming response. Junior science club set up to create project after school hours.Due to large numbers -circa twenty five pupils- we have created three groups to meet after school every Monday, Thursday and Friday from 3.05 to 3.45.Tuesday and Wednesday are taken up with after school chess club.

Creating Project

Mid November: At our meetings after school we discuss how we will put the project together. We

decide to create a page on the school blog at http://askeabns.wordpress,com

We also decide that it would be a good idea to have a poll about our project. Mr. Cole, our class teacher, suggested that we use polldaddy.com. This poll is very fair as you can have only one vote per computer. After a lot of discussion we said that the best way to present our project would be to make a video presentation. We have decided to use Moviemaker to put our project together as Ms. Mullally, our other 5th class teacher knows all about this program. We could then show our project on a flat screen TV which was donated to school by two former teachers.

Please note: To ensure children did not come across inappropriate material on the internet, Learning Support teacher, Mr. Farrell would collect appropriate examples and images for this project. These searches were a result of group discussions and children had final say on what resources were used. This methodology ensured the project was more focused.

Developing Project.Late November 2011: We start researching project by deciding that the most practical way to get digital money to work would be through the mobile phone. As part of our research we discovered some companies were putting “plastic money” i.e. credit cards on mobile phones. The best example of this is Google Wallet.

We also decided to look at what could happen if there was no more paper money. We came up with some interesting possibilities and finally decided on the following three examples.

1: If all money were digital you would have no more children begging as cash would no longer exist. We picked this example because we performed “Oliver” at our school concert.

2: If all money were digital, you could track rubbish being dumped through bar codes on the litter. We picked the anti-litter example as we have a very active Green Schools committee.3: If parents could control the nature of money they could stop their children buying too many sweets and burgers! We picked this example as we have a very strong healthy eating policy in the school.

Late November 2011

We use our afterschool meetings to put together a script for our video presentation. We start filming our script. This script will link all the images and films that we have selected from the internet. This does not work out well as script is too long and angles for filming are wrong.We decide to start again. This time it is much better as we have done far more research on our project. We have learnt the lesson that less is more when it comes to presentations.By putting our project and our research links on our school blog we can work on our project from home. For example we learnt that the Chinese invented paper money over a thousand years ago. CASH is a Chinese word for metal coins!

Near Field Communication“Basically, Near Field Communication (NFC) is a short-range wireless technology that enables the communication between devices over a distance of less than 10 cm.

The data transfer typically takes place at 424kbits/second. The devices have to be brought within 4cms of each other for data to be transfer.

Sounds like Wif-Fi or Bluetooth right? The advantage is that it consumes less power(just 15 mA of power) ,greater security than Bluetooth, and it foregoes the involved “pairing” process of Bluetooth entirely.

NFC requires nothing more than a tap. Say, Shoppers can pay for purchases by waving their smartphones near or tapping to a retail cash register.”

Source:

Field TripsMid December: We keep coming across the term “Near Field Communication.” We realise it is very important for us to understand what it means. We contact Carlow IT asking if they could help. No problem! We are delighted with this news. A group of us visits Carlow IT where Dr. Dorel Picovici B.Eng,M.Eng, PhD.and Mr. Kelly B.Sc. M.Appl. Sc. C Phys and M.Inst P. explained to us how Near Field Communication works.They were just brilliant. They gave us real life examples of near field communication. They also allowed us to work with a near field communication reader See for yourself in our video presentation. Getting out to meet real scientists was one of the best things we did in this project.

Reviewing Project

Early December: We continued filming our links for the presentation. Much better this time as we kept the links short and too the point.Mr. Farrell sourced more video clips from You Tube that were relevant to the project. We then picked out the best ones for our project. Moviemaker lets you shorten video clips which is great. It is brilliant for including text and photos as well.

We kept a BLOOPERs folder as well, which is very funnyFor the cloud computing part of our presentation we took apart an old computer. We learnt about the hard drive, the fan, the micro chip and the DVD drive. It was great fun using the screwdriver to take everything apart.

Mr. Farrell uploaded our presentation onto the Vimeo website as You tube is blocked by the National schools filtering system.

Exhibiting Project

January 2012: We took our project to the Young Scientist Exhibition at the RDS. Eighteen went to the exhibition with Principal Mrs. Wall and Mr. Farrell. Other boys could not go as they had league soccer matches to play. It was very busy and noisy at the RDS. We had a great time going around to all the exhibits. We took turns talking to people about our project. They were very interested in our project. We were all very tired when we got home that evening.

Improving Project.

Late January 2012. We reviewed our trip to the RDS. As it was very noisy people found it impossible to hear our online presentation. We got a lot of positive feedback though when we explained the project to people at the exhibition. We saw a lot of QR Codes on display at the exhibition. We decided to learn more about them. Mr. Farrell showed us how to shorten urls through Google. Google then turned the shortened urls into QR Codes. Then we used our smart phones to read these QR codes. We found out that the smart phones were better at reading the QR codes from TV than from paper.We took photographs of QR codes and then used a smart phone to read a QR code from the photo on the other phone. We also got a smart phone to read a smart phone reading a QR code from a TV. One of the lads thought this could be a security weakness.

Invitation

Early February 2012: We were delighted to get an invitation to the regional finals of the Ericsson Science Exhibition. However, we could only bring four/five pupils to the exhibition.Mr. Farrell organised a quiz on our project and the boys who got the best scores were picked to represent the school.We have been working very hard going over our project.

Conclusions1: Near Field Communication is an important and secure way to transfer data at very short distances. So yes, digital money can work.2: Many companies will use NFC to make their own business e.g.Google Wallet.3: According to our small poll people think that digital money is a good idea.4: NFC and digital money could be used to solve many problems e.g. no more begging, no more littering, no more bank robberies etc5: Security will be very important see preyproject.com This lets you take a photo or film of the person who stole your computer.

6: Digital money is honest money e.g children will ot be able to buy cigarettes.

Our Own Ideas: Here are some of our extra ideas for using mobile phone technology :

B: The Caloireator: We found a link to a website trulyhuge.com that tells you how many calories in all the fast food shops. This would make a great app for Operation Transformation. Scan and use our qr code the next time you go for a super burger – 540 calories!!!JK: The Child Tracker: You could use your mobile phone to track your child through their mobile phone if they went missing. It could also notify the police if the child had a chip in a wrist band or in their clothes. JK: Stolen Car: If your car was stolen a microchip in your car could be activated by your mobile phone, telling you the location of your car.JK: My Friend’s Phone: You can use NFC to transfer money / phone credit / games / funny jokes , from your phone to theirs.B: Track migration of wildlife with tags.DC: You could use your mobile phone and NFC to activate – deactivate alarms, unlock doors and find your car.JK You could have Netwatch on your mobile phone. B: Your mobile phone or NFC tag could give restricted access to certain parts of the building where you work. It could also monitor what rooms you visited and how often.

IndexWhat is NFC?

Basically, Near Field Communication (NFC) is a short-range wireless technology that enables the communication between devices over a distance of less than 10 cm. The data transfer typically takes place at 424kbits/second. The devices have to be brought within 4cms of each other for data to be transfer. Sounds like Wif-Fi or Bluetooth right? The advantage is that it consumes less power(just 15 mA of power) ,greater security than Bluetooth, and it foregoes the involved “pairing” process of Bluetooth entirely. NFC requires nothing more than a tap. Say, Shoppers can pay for purchases by waving their smartphones near or tapping to a retail cash register.

A bit of History:

NFC was Co-invented by NXP Semiconductors and Sony in 2002. Then a NFC forum was founded in 2004. It includes till date 140 members some of them are LG, Nokia, Huawei, HTC, Motorola, NEC, RIM, Samsung, SonyEricsson, Toshiba, AT&T, Sprint, Rogers, SK, Google,Microsoft, PayPal, Visa, American Express, Intel, TI, Qualcomm, and NXP.

Technical Jargon of NFC:

NFC-based communication between two devices is possible when one device acts as a reader/writer and the other as a tag.

Tag:

The tag is a thin simple device containing antenna and small amount of memory. It is a passive device, powered by magnetic field. Depending on the tag type the memory can be read only, re-writable, and writable once.

Reader:

The reader is an active device, which generates radio signals to communicate with the tags. The reader powers the passive device in case of passive mode of communication.

Operating modes:

There are basically three operating modes

Read/Write: In this mode, the NFC enabled phone can read or write data to any of the supported tag types in a standard NFC data format.

Peer-to-Peer: In this mode, two NFC-enabled devices can exchange data, such as digital photos, contacts and messages.

Emulation: An NFC-enabled phone acts as reader when in contact with tags. In this mode, the phone can act as a tag or contactless card for existing readers.

Working of NFC:

The three main concepts associated with NFC are “Sharing, Pairing, and Transaction.”

Transaction is one of the main entity that NFC Forum is keen on promoting. A smartphone with an NFC chip embedded in it could store all your credit/debit card information. Then the shoppers can pay their purchases waving their smartphones near or tapping them against an NFC-enabled retail cash register. This is just tip of the iceberg. NFC is more than that. NFC could work well for public transit passes, library cards, hotel room keycards, and office building passcards. Even government-issued IDs like driver’s licenses and passports can be replaced or augmented with NFC.

Sharing is done in Peer-to-Peer Mode. You have to just tap your phone to the tag and start exchanging the data. Sharing of data will be limited to smaller item like photos, documents & URLs. Sorry you have to wait for advancement in NFC for sharing of High-Def Video.

Pairing is more simpler as compared to Bluetooth & Wi-Fi. Just tap your phone to another phone to instantly configure a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connection, without the need for passwords. Or just tap your phone against your new router, and never again stress your brain to deliberately remember your complex Wi-Fi password.

List of NFC enabled smartphones:

Nokia E6 Nokia C7-00 and the Nokia Astound and Nokia Oro variants, with the NFC feature

enabled starting with the Symbian Anna release of the OS. Nokia 6212 Classic Nokia 6131 NFC Nokia 3220 + NFC Shell Nokia 5140(i) + NFC Shell Samsung S5230 Tocco Lite/Star/Player One/Avila Samsung SGH-X700 NFC Samsung D500E Sagem my700X Contactless LG 600V Contactless Motorola L7 (SLVR) Benq T80 Sagem Cosyphone Google Nexus S Google Nexus IKC Samsung Galaxy S II (NFC not available in UK) Samsung Wave 578 BlackBerry Bold 9900/9930 Turkcell T20 BlackBerry Torch 9810/9860 Blackberry Curve 9350/9360/9370

Screen Shots of our Science Project from our school blog.

Screen Shots of our Science Project from our school blog.