Arduinos in Museums

New York Times: An Interactive Exhibit for About $30

Over the past few years, museums have switched from expensive general-purpose computers to cheap (~$30) Arduino microcontrollers to run the exhibits:

 “Hackers and geeks have been doing this for years, building all sorts of cool robots and interactive experiences, but now it’s become so simple and inexpensive that artists and designers have adopted it, too.”

...and students.

“The two most important introductions for art in the past 20 years have been the Arduino and Processing,” explained Paola Antonelli, senior curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art.

Sounds like an endorsement of Processing for Intro to CS classes.

How to publish your teaching materials

During this past SIGCSE, I was involved in a couple of discussions about how one finds CS teaching materials on the web. At one point, the conversation turned to how one goes about publishing these materials.

The background for this discussion was base-sixteen.org - a website that I'm working on to catalog (and organize, somewhat) the CS teaching resources that are available on the internet. The question was whether or not this should be a "catalog" (with links to resources that were hosted elsewhere) or a "repository" (which hosts the material on the same site).

There are pros and cons to each approach:

• Because a repository keeps a local copy, the resource will still be available even if the original site goes away. However, this local copy will be out-of-date if the original site is updated (unless the repository is updated as well).
• A catalog has the opposite problem. It will always point to the most recent version, but if the site goes away then the resource will no longer be available (unless it was cached elsewhere).

There are other issues as well, such as whether or not a repository has the legal right to host some material, but the main concern in this discussion was for dealing with materials that are here-today, gone-tomorrow.

This is a particular problem for things like syllabuses and lesson plans because these materials are often hosted on a university (or college, or high school) website which is managed by someone other than the instructor creating the materials.  When the new school year rolls along, the webmaster might decide to clean out all the old "outdated" files. Even if the teacher is in control of their part of the website, when they move on or switch schools the materials will go away with the person (hopefully to reappear somewhere else, but the link is still dead).

There are a number of different approaches for dealing with this, but I was interested primarily in the "webmaster deleted my files" problem because this is something that can usually be avoided by simply publishing the documents on the web yourself.

Of course, creating a website to host a few documents is way too much money and work, but there are far easier (and free!) ways to be in control of your published documents. Companies like DropBox and SpiderOak allow you to host and share documents in the cloud, or you could publish directly from web-document editors like Google Docs.

I created a small document that summarizes some of the ways you can publish your documents on the web:

https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1QRBBrU9ac8A0SSkhx0HKTtvj21Ja-ynMetY2rj_0hcQ
(Isn't that a great URL? Well, that's one of the downsides of having someone else host your material ^_^)

It's published as a Google Doc (rather than in this blog post) so that I can edit and update it as I discover new services. If you have a preferred way of publishing that I don't mention, please let me know so that I can update the document.

"Thankfully, for most people, that's a pretty low bar."

In my opinion, one of the best April Fool's Day pranks this year was Think Geek's PLAYMOBIL™ Apple Store Playset. I don't what it says about me that I would probably buy one if it was actually an item for sale.

But the reason why I'm posting this here is because they also made a fake Apple announcement video for this product.  It's 2min 22sec long, but the money quote in this video comes around 1:29:

"Frankly, if something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical. Thankfully, for most people, that's a pretty low bar."

Matthew Chwat — Graphic Design Specialist

Now, this is funny in the video because they're being over-the-top elitist, but the quote also has a "It's funny because it's true" quality to it.

In particular, it reminded me of Arthur C. Clarke's 3rd law, something that I often quote when discussing how woefully inadequate our education system is at teaching students about the basics of how technology works:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Beyond simply teaching students how to program, we also need to be showing them how computers work at a basic level. I do this in my class by showing them how transistors work, how logic gates can be combined to add numbers, and I also have the students program and build simple electronics projects, often with a microcontroller like an Arduino.

I don't expect these students to become computer engineers, but I do want them to have a general understanding of what's going on inside the "magical" boxes that surround them. This is no different that what we do for other disciplines like Chemistry — we teach the Bohr model of the atom and the periodic table of the elements even though only a very small percentage of students will actually become chemists and need to know this information. We do this because we feel it's good for students to have a basic understanding of the world around us, even if they don't go on and pursue the subject in more depth.

Well, the same reasoning applies to computer technology as well. Especially as we're seeing more and more of it in our lives.