Arduino the Cat, Breadboard the mouse and Cutter the Elephant
So, apparently flapping ears signifies Love and Alarm…
That was of course only a small bit of the wisdom we gained from this group of 8-11 yrs old girls after a whole day of quick and intensive workshop for them. It had been on our mind for awhile to run an experimental Arduino/interaction design workshop for kids,as we were quite curious about how children would enjoy designing and making their own toys.
Surely children being the most natural story tellers, would spark off some interesting vision of interaction design? How can our little friend Arduino help them forget about boring science classes?
We finally decided on giving them a brief of creating an interactive scenario using a soft toy of their choice. In an attempt to entice them into this monstrosity of a task, we made (as the kids were quick to point out, á la Blue Peter) a couple of examples to give them an idea of what could be possible.
It was a difficult selection process...
The first was an Easter egg guardian chick, which ’screams’ and flaps its wings if anyone try to steal an egg from her…
Tracy very much enjoying the dissection process
With Arduino and co all safely hidden into the box, our little egg guardian is nearly ready
Ready!
..and then a claustrophobic pig, which shouts if somebody gets too close to him ‘argh you’re killing me I can’t see anything!’ and flash his eyes. Unfortunately he missed out on stardom in our video as the audio from headphone outputs were barely audible on video 
Pig before he suffered from claustrophobia
'Argh get away from me!'
You can watch some highlights of the workshop here:
Afterthoughts
Having ran the workshop not really knowing how the kids would react to following the design process or technology, we were pretty impressed by their articulate discussions, throwing in their own experience with toys and offering constructive criticisms to each other.
It was interesting to see the contrast between the two groups – the younger ones appear to me more cautious to stay within boundaries of what they have previously seen as they worry about many things being ‘impossible’, which for me was quite unexpected. They had less patience with trying to learn the technological parts, although had a good idea of how the flow of action should be for their ideas. Given a slower teaching pace and a more graphical interface, I believe they would have gained much more control over what was happening.
The older group were lovely to work with and very much on the ball both conceptually and technically. ‘Arduino the Cat and Breadboard the Mouse’ was the best name! We were happy to hear that they found the workshop enjoyable and would like to continue doing something similar in the future.
Overall we found it exciting and refreshing to see them through making a story happen, refining their designs and then crafting and making it all work. We are really looking forward to leading more workshops for kids in the near future!
Tags: arduino, Children's workshop, interaction design, physical computing, soft toy hacking
May 12th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
[...] More information: Seaweed Studio Workshop [...]
May 12th, 2009 at 9:41 pm
This is super inspiring work. Well done. What would be some of your advice for others thinking about holding workshops with kids? What are the hardest things to convey? Did the students know what they were getting into when they signed up for the workshop?
May 14th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Thanks I’m glad you like it
The kids only vaguely knew it was to do with computers and electronics so I think they kind of expected something more dull and science class like to begin with. I’d say from beginning it’s important to lead them away from thinking about things being ‘too difficult’ for them to achieve. Try not to mix children of different age groups as it adds some unnecessary pressure on the younger ones. Simplify everything and try to relate to what they know already/experienced before! Maybe Jess will have something more to add?
May 15th, 2009 at 7:53 am
[...] For a more detailed look at what happened at this ingenious workshop, the instructors posted more photos and explanation here. [...]
May 22nd, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Hi Dan – thanks for your encouraging comments, we really enjoyed running the workshop. Overall I think the reason it worked was that the girls could not pigeonhole the day into ‘boring electronics’ or ‘creative art’ or ‘ICT’ – what they were doing was not easily definable – I think they found that quite freeing. From my point of view it was hard to find a balance between explaining everything and just allowing them to explore the environment without quite knowing what they were doing – I had to really restrain myself from getting too bossy with them!
The girls caught on to the basic concepts very easily and were much less interested in detail than we had anticipated. I suppose because they have a lot of ‘explanation’ type time at school, it was not something they wanted more of on the weekend. Compared to working with adults, they were extremely keen to experiment and were not afraid of breaking things or getting it wrong – so the projects moved along very quickly. Things they really enjoyed were: being able to start and finish the project in one day, using other craft type skills like sewing, thinking about real life scenarios in which to use their projects, not having to understand how the electronics/programming worked. Another thing I noticed was that they were surprisingly patient when things went wrong and didn’t lose focus when we had to struggle with a problem for a while – like finding which wire had come loose, or which bit of code was written incorrectly.
Going forward I think it would be interesting to have a regular group of children working in this way, maybe once a week, to see what would develop once they really got deeply into thinking about this type of work. We’ll let you know the results!.
May 27th, 2009 at 9:07 am
This is really fantastic–and thank you for sharing it! I really enjoyed seeing how the girls were able to think the whole project through–concept, selection of resources, programming logic, etc.–and used a variety of skills to make it happen. I loved the comment at the end, when one of the girls noted that is was good to see how toys like these are made.
June 11th, 2009 at 2:12 am
This is great! I love the idea of mashing electronics with familiar objects to help with storytelling and creative experimentation.
In your write-up, you surmise that a graphical interface might have helped to give them more control over their projects. Can you say a bit more about how they responded to the textual interface? What worked well, and what didn’t? I realize it was a one-day thing so they probably didn’t plow through the programming language, but I’m wondering how much they manipulated the software during the day.
I don’t doubt that kids could benefit from a graphical software development environment, but the graphical interfaces I’ve seen so far have made me skeptical that they’re much better than textual environments. My 5-year-old girl got further with Python than with Scratch, but that might be a dexterity thing at that age. I don’t have classroom experience on which to base conclusions, so I’m interested in stories from the field.
Thanks very much for posting this! Please report on future experiments.
June 17th, 2009 at 1:18 am
Hi Dan,
Thanks – it’s really interesting to hear that 5 year olds nowadays can do Python!
The problem with the textual interface for younger children it seems was the lack of incentive to investigate it further as it simply looks incomprehensible to them (possibly also because by that stage they’ve just ran out of patience to solve any more problems too..) What did work well was asking them to change values of some of the variables – which allowed them to see very direct effect caused by their editing. We managed to do a lot more in terms of programming with the 10-11 group, who had more patience with exploring what the various bits of code was actually doing.
For the next children’s workshop we would hope to dedicate more time in teaching them about programming and widen their possibilities so we’ll keep you updated on how that goes!
June 29th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
[...] A great piece on children on natural interactive designers. (via Dave Smith’s bookmarks) [...]
June 30th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
I wonder what it would be like to compare a group of homeschool kids and a group of public school kids. Would their ideas be measurably different? Would the group behave differently?