Festival2012/Submit/Codebender: Hack the real world

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  • Title of session: Codebender: Hack the real world
  • Your name and affiliation: Vasilis Georgitzikis, lead developer of Codebender, Stelios Tsampas, embedded systems developer
  • Session format: Learning Lab

What will your session or activity allow people to make, learn or do?

Our goal is to teach and motivate people to hack in the real world, helping them make the transition from users to makers and construct things that have the ability to change (and better) our everyday lives, using easy-to-use tools like the Arduino microcontroller and a variety of sensor and actuators. We will show how to use and program the Arduino to get you started on your next interactive installation, home automation, robotic design or hobby electronics project.

How do you see that working?

We will be showing and using codebender to develop your first program fast and easily, and in order to facilitate the collaboration between participants.

We will start by introducing the Arduino board and its capabilities, and we will proceed to showcase a couple of projects that are built around it. We will then start developing a couple of easy and handy projects, and get acquainted with programming physical installations and devices.

How will you deal with 5, 15, 50 participants?

5-10 participants is the ideal number for this workshop. We will get everyone's computer set up and ready to use an Arduino. This boils down to just downloading the drivers for Arduino (only on Windows) and creating accounts for the participants in codebender.cc which is completely web based so it should be a pretty straightforward process. After that, everyone should be ready to start hacking.

In case we get more participants (or in case someone doesn't bring their laptop), we will divide people into groups and get them to code together and collaborate. We would probably try to place more experienced, with programming, people to each group as informal leaders to guide and help if needed.

How long within your session before someone else can teach this?

1 hour. After that, people will be encouraged to teach others, develop their own idea, or both.

What do you see as outcomes after the festival?

People will get started with coding on the physical world, and realize that they don't have to be software/hardware gurus to make things that influence their lives (or the lives of others). Our goal is to bridge the gap between the web and the real world (which is where codebender comes in) and to motivate people to start building their own stuff(with a great platform like Arduino). We believe that we can work towards that by teaching people to code and develop cool, interactive projects. Hopefully these people will teach and motivate others in the future, thus sharing the knowledge and giving back to the community.