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)

Alan Yorinks shared on Arduino Community on Gplus a physical computing environment he created to make it easier for 10 and 11 year old’s to start playing. He picked up an Arduino Esplora, and wrote some software so that it could be controlled from the Scratch and Snap! graphical programming languages. According to Alan, the Arduino Esplora has on-board integrated sensors, actuators and make it a perfect match for the graphical programming languages that the kids love to use.

By combining an Arduino Esplora microcontroller with the esp4s library and either the Scratch or Snap! programming languages, that first line of code can be written in minutes!

Take a look at his documentation on Github.

A science teacher at Bundang management high school 20 kilometers southeast of downtown Seoul, South Korea, involved his students in an Arduino Music project running Arduino Uno, Sparkfun Music Instrument Shield and Makey Makey.

Students started studying the principles of sensors and then built their own music instruments using recycled materials. Finally they played them as you can see from the video he shared with us:

See more pictures and videos at this link.

Hackaball is a smart and responsive ball that children can program to invent and play games. It was recently backed by more than 1000 people and reached the goal!

As many other projects on Kickstarter, Hackaball was initially prototyped with Arduino using sensors that detect motions like being dropped, bounced, kicked, shaken or being perfectly still.

We got in touch with its team and asked them to tell us a bit more about the creation process:

Our early versions of the ball worked with the Arduino Uno board, progressing to a breadboard Arduino and then making our own SMD designs with the Uno. In the latests prototypes we used the Arduino Leonardo and our current version runs on the Arduino Mega. Our production version will run on an ARM chip.

We hope to offer Arduino Compatibility as one of our stretch goals in the Kickstarter, so that people can buy a board and put their own code on it using the Arduino software, effectively moving one step up from the app in terms of hacking the ball and making it do what you want it to do. We also believe many adults would love an interactive ball that they can control and design their own interactions – its packed full of features! Hopefully it will also allow kids who’ve outgrown our app to experiment with our technology in a more challenging way, bringing longevity to the product.

We’ve approached the kids who’ll play with Hackaball as the future Makers. The idea of hacking and getting close to technology starts with how the ball first arrives in your home. Kids open the packaging to find the ball is broken: Hackaball has crash-landed on earth and needs to be put back together again. After their first achievement, making the ball, kids are challenged to play games, change existing ones, fix broken games and create new ones from scratch.

We specifically designed the ball and packaging to be gender neutral – making it feel accessible to both boys and girls from the very beginning. We also expanded on the ability of the ball to include both hard and soft skills – from the tactile and linear computational thinking, to the storytelling and imagination-driven game creation, teaching a new generation of Makers to combine technology and creativity. We think that the kids who play with Hackaball would move on to Arduino in their teens!

You still have some days to back the project and help them reach the stretch goals, making Hackaball even more hackable!

If you're teaching kids how to code, what do you do to show that software makes an impact in the real world? MIT has a clever idea: a robot garden. The project lets you control a grid of Arduino-linked "plants" through programming that makes them blossom and light up in pretty (and occasionally mesmerizing) ways. It'll even teach the virtues of distributed computing -- you can tell these leafy robots to bloom or change color in algorithm-driven sequences. The garden is just a demo for now, but it'll eventually turn into an easy-to-replicate curriculum for students who'd otherwise have to settle for seeing their results on-screen.

[Image credit: Jason Dorfman, CSAIL]

Filed under: Science, Software

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Source: MIT News

Regardless of your budget, time and flair, there’s a perfect pick to put under your friends’ and relatives’ tree this year. We created a series of Gift Guides to help you be more relaxed and efficient in finding the best solution for all. You can check below and find out also some good news regarding free shipping (check at the end of the blogpost!)

Kids

Winter holidays and Christmas is the time most of the people focus on kids and family in the most broader sense. And never like today we have the chance to make a present and open up new worlds to the little ones.

Yes. I’m talking about the experience you have playing with littleBits Base Kit for the first time. It’s an excitement for electronics you can share with kids and teenagers also happening when playing with Bare Conductive Pen, Voltage Village  Glowing House or the TV-B-Gone Kit designed to shut off any TV. They are like an entire universe hiding into a game box!

Explore the gift guide dedicated to kids

IoT & Connectivity

IoT and connected devices  has absolutely exploded in the past year, so if you’ve got coders and startuppers on your gift list, these ideas could save your time. In this gift guide you’ll find a selected list for different tastes and for sure there’s something for everyone.

From the well known Arduino Yún to the Annikken Andee for Android  smartphones designed to make mobile integration simple, you can learn how to build Wireless Sensor Networks and test the power of Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy with Blend Micro.

Explore the gift guide dedicated to IoT

Home Lab

Some people say that in the future our homes will be fully automated, with refrigerators ordering your milk when it’s over, and other gizmos enabling the materialisation of a truly smart home. Is this what we want? Probably we’re not sure yet but there are a few tools  that you can buy for your house that will get you and your friends to feel like what it means to have a home lab.

Starting from a Materia 101 kit to 3d print cool decorations for Christmas and you can take your holiday time to build it with the help of some friends. Or use some quite days to dive in the world of electronics exploring Make Electronics book by Charles Platt or tinkering with some components you’ve never had time to explore like the Arduino Wireless SD Proto Shield or the Tinkerkit DMX Receiver .

Explore the gift guide dedicated to Home Lab

Fashion Tech

Fashion and tech are closer than ever these days. Textile sensors make every interactive project comfortable to wear and easy to prototype. Soft potentiometers, Textile push buttons, Stretch sensors connected to an Arduino Lilypad are the best components to explore this promising field. You can begin with the Open Softwear book 2nd edition plus the Easy Wearable Kit and then move forward with  yellow EL-Wires to brighten your winter. If you want to explore new approaches not related with electronics, then try  the DIY alternative to print fabrics using light with Lumi KIT Red or Blu.

Explore the gift guide dedicated to Fashion

Arduino Store is now offering FREE SHIPPING to Europe via GLS for all orders over €100, below 3 Kg overall weight. GLS delivery will take 4-5 working days to reach you. In December, this may take longer due to end-of-the-year seasonality. Should you need delivery by Dec. 24th, we strongly advice you to place the order before Dec. 15th. Learn more about shipping

Maker Camp is a free summer camp from Make and Google for building, tinkering and exploring.
Back in July Massimo was invited for a live streaming interview to talk about Arduino (starting at 11’20”) together with Ayah Bdeir , founder of the littleBits electronic components. Enjoy the video!

Toot is an interactive and sound-active toy designed for children aged between 3 and 6 years old that wants to enhance their auditory, music and language skills. It was developed by Federico Lameri as his thesis project of Master of Interaction Design at Supsi and prototyped using Arduino Leonardo.

The toy is composed by eight little cubical speaker boxes:

On each speaker children are able to record a sound. In order to listen back to the recorded sound the speaker must be shaken as if the sound was physically trapped into a box. After having recorded sounds on them, the speakers can be placed in a sequence after Mr.toot, and by tapping on his head it is possible to trigger the playback of the speakers in a sequence. toot is also matched with a mobile application that offers different kind of interactions and experiences. it allows to play some exercise that will teach children to listen, understand and catalog sound and melodies.

The app expands the possibilities of interaction, offering different exercises created with the help of musicians and educators from different areas of expertise,  some of them are also inspired by a Montessori sensorial activity.

Take a look at the video interview with Montessori educator Fanny Bissa:

Summer is upon us. The Lightgame Project is a multiplayer reaction time based game built around the Arduino. It’s a perfect rainy day project for those restless kids (and adults!). Designed by two undergraduate students [Efstathios] and [Thodoris] for a semester long project, all the hard work has already been done for you.

There are tons of reasons we love games that you can build yourself. For one, it’s an amazing way to get children interested in hobby electronics, making, and hacking. Especially when they can play the game with (and show off to) their friends. Another reason is that it is a perfect way to share your project with friends and family, showcasing what you have been learning. The game is based on your reaction time and whether or not you press your button when another players color is shown. The project is built around two Arduinos connected via I2C. The master handles the mechanics of the game, while the slave handles the TFT LCD and playing music through a buzzer.

I2C is a great communication protocol to be familiar with and this is a great project to give it a try. [Efstathios] and [Thodoris] did a great job writing up their post, plus they included all the code and schematics needed to build your own. It would be great to see more university professors foster open source hardware and software with their students. A special thanks goes out to [Dr. Dasygenis] for submitting his student’s work to us!

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