Final Tags of Fun Lecture of 2013

This is the latest design for the “Tagomatic” box. Expect a smaller one for next year.

We had our last 5:15 pm lecture today. I can’t say that I’ll miss them, although this one was quite fun. I went through the exam paper for last year (you can’t get more fun than that) and gave away four owls, including a “Golden Christmas Owl” to someone who’s name I completely failed to pronounce properly. Oh well, perhaps the next version of the “Tagomatic” can have text to speech. For those that haven’t heard of it, the “Tagomatic” is a little Gageteer powered box that reads the RFID tags of folks at a lecture and then picks a random winner from the assembled multitude. I first used it for the welcome party, where we had it allocating the free drinks, and I’ve been using it in my Friday First Year lectures to make things a little more interesting.

People have seemed to engage very well with the project, bringing along their tags and scanning them for a chance to win small prizes. I even had someone get in touch asking where they can get a tag from…. Next year I’m planning to have multiple tag readers, spot prizes and Bluetooth networking back to my phone.

It almost makes me wish for another 5:15 lecture on Friday. Almost……