Omkar is a special 8 years old who created a wearable device called O Watch: an Arduino Zero-based smartwatch kit for kids. The project, recently kickstarted, allows young people to learn programming, 3D printing and a bit of craft while making their own smartwatch and customizing it. The kit will be released with a series learning tools including a kid-friendly website with easy tutorials, examples and a community to share creations.

He’s not new to DIY tech and learning as he’s been doing a few workshops to teach Arduino to other kids and likes it when they get excited about making Arduino projects. Omkar told us:

I was first interested in robots. But my dad got me started with projects that light up LEDs that were easier to learn and code myself. (ps: my dad did not let me get a robot kit at first :).

I decided to do a wearable project because there were many of them I saw in the news and I thought they were cool. I wanted to make a smartwatch so that I could wear it myself and share my project with my friends in school.

If you are a kid and are new to making, O Watch could be a great starting point as you’ll learn about coding, 3d printing, craft and also sharing. The Arduino IDE will be your  primary programming tool for the watch, the case can be 3D printed in a color of your choice and you’ll experiment on how to knot yourself a cool band to wear it.

What are you waiting for? You have just a few days to back the project on Kickstarter and have an O Watch delivered to your home!

Arduino Verkstad has just started CTC* Catalunya 2015 in Barcelona with David Cuartielles preparing a group of 200 teachers that will be teaching CTC to students in Cataluña next September. A technology fair will be hosted at the end of the program and we are expecting more than 2500 people to attend.

Creative Technologies in the Classroom (CTC) is a collaborative learning curriculum designed for schools that wish to incorporate emerging technologies into their existing technology classes. It’s also a collection of experiments aimed at transforming the way technology is taught in schools around the world. These experiments introduce basic concepts in programming, electronics, and mechanics.These experiments introduce basic concepts in programming, electronics, and mechanics.

Thanks to the Departament d’Ensenyament of the Generalitat de Catalunya and our partner eduCaixa Obra Social “La Caixa” who is also involved with launching CTC for 75 schools in Andalusia in the fall. Stay tuned with Arduino Verkstad blog for news on CTC Andalucía.

Last year’s show included over 240 projects, which means we’ll probably have twice as many for this year’s show. This is the second edition of the program and it will reach 103 schools; we expect about 2.500 students to be involved in the project and the final fair will be at CosmoCaixa Museum in Barcelona on February 6th, 2016. Since the numbers promise a lot and the amount of people participating might be big, we will need the whole temporary exhibition space at the museum to be booked for the fair!

Click here for a press article on the teachers’ training in Barcelona. (in Catalan).

The news was originally posted on the Arduino Verkstad Blog.

Sónar+D is the international conference that brings together a combination of activities with a common theme: the relationship between creativity and technology and the digital transformation of the cultural industries involved.

During latest edition David Cuartielles gave a talk about the value of Open Source and a workshop with Alessandro Contini titled Making Noise with Arduino. 

David presented some examples like:

• The Alcontrol Device (a breath analyser that detects high alcohol levels and limits mobile usage of a user depending on how drunk he/she is)
• The involuntary dance machine that uses electrical stimulus to different muscles
• A 5-day hack to a car that needed be driven remotely by musicians playing live
• A large scale light installation for the Jakarta Marathon

He also got the opportunity to talk about robotics, kids learning code and electronics, and the future of Arduino. Later on Bruce Sterling, curator of Casa Jasmina,  was the protagonist of the festival’s closing keynote and talked about technology, music and the past/current state of the industry.

News originally posted on Arduino Verkstad blog

We are excited to introduce our new collaboration with Autodesk, launching with us the Arduino Basic Kit in the US! Starting today we are bringing creativity and electronics to everyone wanting to get started with more than 30 components added into the 123D Circuits simulator and 15 step-by-step tutorials available through the Project Ignite learning platform.

With the Arduino Basic Kit you’ll be able to access digital simulations for a unique experience of engagement with the kit, understanding and tapping right away into the power of smart objects.

“Arduino is creating new opportunities for makers and educators to get hands on with coding and electronics,” said Samir Hanna, vice president and general manager, Consumer and 3D Printing, Autodesk. “Our collaboration with Arduino will enable our passionate community of users to unlock their creativity while building the skills to succeed in a technologically-focused world.”

“By collaborating with Autodesk on the Arduino Basic Kit we are showing that designing electronics is a great educational area for teachers,” said Massimo Banzi, co-founder of Arduino. “By offering our tutorials in digital format instructors can involve students of all ages on interactive projects within Project Ignite platform.”

Autodesk recently launched Project Ignite during the White House National Week of Making to provide a free and open learning platform that builds the skills of young learners through creative, hands-on design experiences focused on the latest technology trends like 3D printing and electronics. Through these efforts, Autodesk aims to empower the next generation of innovators with the tools and confidently enter this new future of making things.

What’s in the Arduino Basic Kit:

• All the physical and digital components you need to build simple projects and learn how to turn an idea into reality using Arduino and Autodesk 123D Circuits.
• The digital simulations in 123D Circuits provide a unique experience to engage and learn about the power of smart objects .
• Exclusive online access to 15 step-by-step tutorials, through the Project Ignite learning platform, to make simple projects using components that let you control the physical world.

Projects include:

• Get to know your tools: An introduction to the concepts you need to know to advance
• Love-O-Meter to measure how hot-blooded you are
• Zoetrope to create a mechanical animation you can play forward or reverse
• Knock Lock to tap a secret code and open the door

Get your kit today, exclusively at www.autodesk.com/arduino for $84.00.

Join the conversation on the Arduino Forum.

Every year the students of the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) attend the Physical Computing class as part of their curriculum.

Having a small delegation of the Arduino team teaching this class has become quite a ritual. This past March Ubi De Feo, Alice Pintus, and Lorenzo Romagnoli runned the two-weeks-long intensive class.

Teaching at CIID is great experience, since you are surrounded by incredibly motivated and curious students, that are doing everything possible to design amazing projects and prototypes.

The topic of this year was prototyping interactive installations for a Science Center that would explain in a playful and engaging way how a technology works. For most of the students this was the first experience with physical computing, but even in such short time they were able to build eight different prototypes. The projects explain in an interactive way the science behind computer viruses, allergies, video compression, machine learning, laser printing, digital music synthesis, binary numbers and neuroprosthetic.

In Explaining laser printing Victoria Hammel, Chelsey Wickmark, Ciaràn Duffy, Feild Craddock demonstrate how the laser printer works. By using 16 servomotors connected to an Arduino UNO to move a matrix of magnets they were able to attract iron filings and draw letters on paper.

In Troyan 77 Karan Chaitanya Mudgal, Liliana Lambriev, Gunes Kantaroglu, Dhruv Saxena visualize the effects of a Trojan Virus harming your computer. Connecting Processing to Arduino they were able to create an overlay projection on top of the maze representative of the effect of the viruses on a computer.

Sound Blocks by John Ferreira, Alejandra Molina and Andreas Refsgaard is an musical instrument that explain how to compose sounds combining multiple soundwaves. The prototype was built using Arduino as a midi controller for Ableton.

Creative Mornings is a series of talks given by creative types all over the world and recorded for everyone to see online.

Last May, 22-year-old Nerea de la Riva Iriepa, one of the worlds most promising young talents in Robotics gave an inspiring talk about her journey in the world of robotics, her discovery of Arduino, how to work in team and also how to deal with a male-dominated robot world.

She is currently student of Electronic Communications at the University of Alcalá in Madrid and also an intern at Arduino in Malmö where she is creating educational content for beginners and finding ways to make coding easier for young users.

Creative Technologies in the Classroom* gives us a lot of joy whenever we visit students’ fairs. Each iteration of CTC (Madrid, Castilla, Barcelona and so forth) has its own technology fair and it is meant to award and congregate students and their projects. Arduino Verkstad, teachers, school and government representatives join as well to celebrate and share what students have learned along the program.

This year is the third edition of CTC Castilla and the fair had 140 projects, 936 students and 70 teachers. We have noticed that:

• Teachers learned along with the students since they are not reproducing the CTC projects as the final projects, they have innovating by bringing new ideas
• We got told that teachers are forced by the students to open the labs late after school hours because they want to spend more time working on their projects
• Students have become pretty good at pitching projects, not only their production is excellent, but also their presentation skills

Some of the most impressive projects are:

A robotic hand controlled from a phone that even had an app with the sign language alphabet so that the hand would “talk” for you, and an R2D2 made of recycled materials. All the pictures and many videos of the projects can be seen here. Thanks to Centro Regional de Formación del Profesorado, Castilla La Mancha and congratulations to all CTC participants!

*Creative Technologies in the Classroom (CTC) is a collection of experiments aimed at transforming the way technology is taught in schools around the world. These experiments introduce basic concepts in programming, electronics, and mechanics.

(The news was originally posted on Arduino Verkstad blog by Laura Balboa)

With the new (experimental) Arduino extension for Scratch, you can create visual programs to control sensors and actuators connected to Arduino boards. Try it on the new ScratchX site.

Scratch allows kids (and everyone) to create their own games, interactive stories, and animations using a visual programming environment. Scratch is made by the Lifelong Kindergarten (LLK) group at the MIT Media Lab. The ScratchX.org site is a place for trying out new, experimental extensions to Scratch — e.g. for connecting to hardware or web services. As a member of both Arduino and LLK, I’m especially excited about this possibility to combine Scratch with Arduino.

This Scratch extension, created by Kreg Hanning and me (mostly Kreg), communicates with the Firmata firmware on an Arduino board. This allows you to send the Arduino commands using special Scratch blocks. To start, we have blocks for working with LEDs, servo motors, buttons, rotation knobs (potentiometers), light sensors, and temperature sensors. There are also more general (and Arduino-like) blocks for doing analog and digital input and output. For more information, see the documentation.

If you have any trouble using the Arduino extension or have any suggestions, please open an issue on the extension repository.

Of course, this isn’t the first attempt to connect Scratch and Arduino. For other approaches, see S4A, s2a_fm, and Catenary. For even more options, see SparkFun’s discussion of alternative programming interfaces for Arduino.

InternTrip is a board game prototyped by 2nd year Masters students at the École de Communication Visuelle Aquitaine (France) and running on Arduino at Heart Blend Micro.

Once again designers Guillaume Beinat and Alexandre Suné of Tazas Project directed a dozen students* into creating an  immersive game focusing on the experience of internship in a communication agency:

 The system they use relies on the use of an Arduino bluetooth card which calculates the player’s position on the board and simultaneously transmits this information to the smartphone. The coordinates received allow the player to discover the inside of the agency by moving their smartphone over the outer wall of the building, or in other words, the board. From table football to the terrasse, passing by the coffee machine or the photocopier, they invite us to visit the agency, to talk with the team and to compete with our colleagues in head to head questionnaires about the world of advertising. This is your time,  young,  exploited interns, to take your revenge and land that job!

* Manon Fauvel, Anna Borup, Benjamin Armel, Charlotte du Portal, Émilien Badoc, Guilhem Pacha, Isabelle Ducournau, Nicolas Pierre, Sandy Kauy, Sophie Cazes, Arnaud Bresson

We are happy to announce that Creative Technologies in the Classroom has been successfully implemented in Ecuador since the fall of 2014 in 40 different places along the country, to more than 600 participants and thanks to the Telefonica Foundation Ecuador.

Creative Technologies in the Classroom (CTC) is a collection of experiments aimed at transforming the way technology is taught in schools around the world for participants going from 10 to 18 years old. These experiments introduce basic concepts in programming, electronics, and mechanics and consists of four phases:

• Teacher Training (1 week)
• Themed Modules (4 modules)
• Student Projects (9 weeks)
• Technology Fair

CTC Ecuador has also been implemented within the Pro Niño Project that helps employed children to attend to educational activities and learn about technology. This aims to open an opportunity for them to study at the technical universities in the area (many of them also support the project). The teachers for CTC/Pro Niño are social workers instead of regular school teachers. Here are some pictures of the program in El Oro and the South of Quito.

Some CTC Ecuador projects were also presented at an exhibition in Cuenca about society, art and technology hosted by Telefonica Movistar Ecuador.

(The news was originally posted on Arduino Verkstad blog)