It’s been just over three weeks since I stumbled across David Cuartielles’ talk at the Dublin Web Summit, ambiguously titled Research in Education – Future Opportunities, but I can’t seem to stop thinking about it.
Cuartielles is one of the founding partners of Arduino, a brilliantly affordable family of single-board microcontrollers (aka the building block of some really cool computing) that allows you to create interactive objects and environments. Whilst that might sound complex, the reality is that the lovely folks at Arduino designed this board to be used in education, by children, hobbyists, hardcore coders and my Grandma alike. It’s easy to set up, install and comes with a wealth of online resources and guides to get you started. And to give you a little flavour of what you can do with an Arduino – their blog plays host to some of the incredible projects people are producing with the kit across the world, from a sensor that prevents your cat from pinching food from the table to a gesture-controlled robot.
The talk Cuartielles gave at The Summit walked us through the inspiring work his team are doing across schools in Spain, called the Castilla Education Project. Whilst the project as a research piece is interesting, it was the organic outputs of these classroom sessions and Open Source nature of the entire project that were captivating.
The participants go through a ten week programme of learning code syntax (let me just chip in here and say that the children looked about 10 years old…), processing and engineering, and from there they’re invited to create their own build. Cuartielles showed us kids who’d created their own versions of Guitar Hero, plant watering systems and motion sensor gloves. These children can do more with the Arduino technology than the majority of teenagers and adults I know; and I have a feeling that when they get to my age, the world of technology will be another leap forward because of their influence.
Better yet is the fact that the whole course, like the Arduino itself, is Open Source, licensed by Arduino under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0, allowing anyone to use the material, distribute and build upon it for non-commercial purposes. Wouldn’t it be great if more teachers or youth group leaders took up that opportunity?
Check out some of the amazing projects built with Arduino here, and check out some of the maker project’s we’ve worked on here.