Arduino: The Documentary

Written By Alison Mann 991988300

After much consideration, I wrote my

KMD reflection on Arduino: by our The KMD Documentary. Inspired

Hackathon, my visit to the Mozilla Pop-Up event, my love of film and a growing interest but scant understanding of Arduino, this direction was a good fit. I want to reflect on how this documentary has not only touched on many of the themes discussed in class, but its relevance to my pedagogical practice as a secondary school media teacher. Arduino: The Documentary is a 30-minute video written and directed by Rodrigo Calvo and Raul Alaejos and released in 2011 freely on Archive.org and Vimeo. It follows the inception of Arduino as an open source hardware board developed by a team in Italy later released to the world. In a series of interviews, the designers trace the development and iterative process of improving Arduino. It essentially came out of the desire to create something cheaper and more accessible for students to use. As the project grew, more team members were added as required. The creative team decided to make Arduino open source early on as an endeavor to implement valuable input

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from other experts. The documentary includes interviews from electronic makers in the field such as Adafruit and Sparkfun whose philosophies are in line with those of the creators at Arduino: making DIY electronics and design recipes accessible to anyone online.

Values associated with Arduino Accessibility Participatory Adaptability Learning Community Discovery Playfulness Simplicity Creativity

Connections to Design Theory Value centered Design is one theory that quickly came to mind as I viewed this video. In this documentary, Arduino appears to be a playful and accessible tool for experts and tinkerers alike. Its design features have human values at heart: its a simple and adaptable tool for creative use by individuals (freely sharing open source code online) or a community of learners. There is a sense of our cultures current ethos in this little circuit board: download, use, create, manipulate and then share. Yet Arduino is also quite closely related to interactive design, in fact, the project itself began at the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy in 2005. To describe interaction design, Shedroff stated in 2002, today we do not operate with 2

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computers, we interact with them. And successful digital artifacts are designed to be experienced, not simply used. The emphasis of interaction design is on the creation of compelling experiences (Nathan Shedroff, 2002 as cited by Bolter and Gromala. 2003, p. 24). This very definition and our past experience with Raspberry Pi was similar to the experiences the users described with Arduino. Not only did I enjoy our process of constructing knowledge together, but I experienced the aesthetic pleasure of creating something new. And yet, there are also elements of the 'co-realization' model that Blomberg & Karasti have identified. To paraphrase how my peer Sean described it in our online discussion board, design is on a spectrum of continual iteration where a design-in-use strategy method is applied. There is both a user-centric and participatory nature and input from informants is greatly valued. Arduino works much along this fashion; changes are often made based on user feedback.

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Arduino and Education What I found most appealing in this documentary were the implications of Arduino technology on pedagogy. Several interviewees note that allowing students to
Scene from Arduino: The Documentary, 20:11

experiment with Arduino in

high school can open up possibilities later in life, not just for engineers, but artists, designers and more. This tool indeed has many connections with constructivist teaching methods. Contructivism emphasizes the collective construction of knowledge using real life problem solving approaches and authentic learning situations. Teachers become facilitators in this process, whereby student discovery can occur. In a class reading: Encoding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by Gabriella Coleman, the author points out a stage of deep mode hacking as an opportunity for flow; a state of full immersion and deep engagement in a particular activity. Furthermore, Dewey argues that interaction is one of the most important elements of a learning experience and that an experience is always what it is because of a transaction taking place between an individual and what, at the time, constitutes his environment... (Dewey, 1938 as cited by Vrasidas, 2002, p.1). I think Arduino can provide such an engagement and interaction for students. 4

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In one segment of the documentary, Juan Carlos De Mena, a high school teacher in Madrid, is working collaboratively with his students on the production of student invented Arduino devices. We see groups of students hovering over work tables on their computers with the Arduino attached to a computer port, one teen is playing with his no-touch instrument that only requires a hand to hover over top of the sensors. In another shot, two girls are discussing their caterpillar-like Arduino device as it crawls across the table. The teacher notes out that this process gives students a glimpse of how things work and their schematics. He credits Arduino with giving students the opportunity to participate in a community and work as a team, a critical element in constructivist learning. He finishes by saying that Arduino lets the students learn whats inside and get the control back. As an educator, I witnessed much of the same types of experiences occurring at the
Mozilla Hive Pop-Up in Peterborough

Mozilla Pop Up event in which youth

participants moved freely to various stations and experience first-hand the many interactive tools and activities available. In their event description, Mozilla actively encourages youth to become a creator - and not just a consumer - of technology and the web. Participants moved freely to various stations and experience first-hand the many interactive tools and activities available. In their event description, Mozilla actively encourages 5

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youth to become a creator - and not just a consumer - of technology and the web. I think we have much to look forward to in the coming years with open source software, and now hardware. As the virtual world opens up and shares more and more of its secrets, it appears we can all become makers and creators with help from one another.

13-04-10 7:36 PM Works Cited:

Bolter, J. David, and Diane Gromala. 2003. Introduction in Windows and mirrors: interaction design, digital art, and the myth of transparency. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Vrasidas, C. (2000). Constructivism vs Objectivism: Implications for Interaction, Course Design, and Evaluation in Distance Education. International Journal of Educational Telecommunications. 6(4), 339-362.