fuel for bio-thoughts

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!

As part of the MA Design for Interactive Media course at Middlesex University, there was a particularly charming little project where the task is to make a ’small object of delight’. (In fact we enjoyed it so much that we expanded the idea and made it part of Seaweed’s work too…) We always thought it was a shame that at the time we didn’t have the knowledge to make it a physical object of delight, so this eventually led to the birth of our first workshop ran for the MA DIM students of 2008/2009.

We finally decided on the theme of ‘Rooms’, where students had to decide on a room of their choice alongside with an adjective. We picked this theme as it gave scope for students to rethink their intimate surroundings as well as providing a definite environment to design for. After 6 sessions in a secluded little room reminescent of a school science lab, going through programming games, various prototypes and idea discussions, we were really pleased with all of their final work.

Here are some of their lovely artefacts:

Middlesex Arduino Workshop Overview from jessica wolpert on Vimeo.
You can see the complete set of videos here: Seaweedstudio vimeo group

Tracy the soldering expert

Success at last for Emma

Gina dreams of windmills