This year we introduce our kid to STEM, learn ourselves and try to teach her about gyroscopic control. In first grade, she only learns short words, she cannot read the challenge or resources.

She has been skating recently and learned some spinning skills. Let’s start from what she knows, what better way but spin the World for start :-). Sure, we can make an app to do just this.

Imagine smartphone as a windshield of your flying saucer. The flying saucer in the app is the MKMapCamera object. We fly it by assigning its coordinate from observation of the gyro information.

Our original approach comprised of spinning around one’s own axis and holding the device in front of your face. We realized this is unsafe (hence our moto: “Watch your step”) especially on the ice where she needs both hands and eyes to balance. What other options do we have? Could we instead propel the smartphone “hands-free” if you will :-) ?

Turns out that we can! The smartphone comes with a tiny propulsion system. The haptic engine generated angular momentum and we have used it to rotate the phone. This is safer flight!

Here is what the final toy does:

1. The haptic engine vibrates and causes the device to rotate
2. The gyro picks up the rotation and outputs the rotation rate
3. The app updates the longitude of the virtual camera correspondingly
4. The image on the screen updates to what the saucer sees when orbiting the Earth

Our app is the 'Hello World' of gyroscopic flight control apps, but also includes all the parts to learn about UAS controllers.

The source code for the app is here: https://github.com/krassik/hello

We used the most important NASA resource:

1. Inspiration, available from: https://www.nasa.gov/kidsclub/index.html

Future projects:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cgfr-Y1dpdI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrAT7TPApHs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvIamCV9cxw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_VI3tBzyI4

With ♡ for NASA