LilyPad Arduino: Rethinking the Materials and Cultures of Educational Technology

• In Event: Textile Messages: Dispatches From the World of E-Textiles and Education

Abstract

1. Objective
Margolis and Fisher’s (2001) groundbreaking study on gender in computer science focused on “unlocking the clubhouse”. In their report on the study they illustrate how traditional computing culture functions as a white/Asian boys’ club and argue that it is crucially important to unlock this clubhouse to make it more accessible to women and minorities. Our experiences suggest a different approach; one we call “building new clubhouses”. Instead of trying to fit people into existing computing cultures, we want to spark and support new ones. Rather than trying to recruit young women to robotics clubs and classes, we engage them in computation through electronic textile clubs and classes—venues that young women flock to with little prompting.

2. Perspective
The LilyPad Arduino is a construction kit that enables students to build and program tangible interactive devices (Buechley, 2008). It consists of a set of controllable input and output pieces, like temperature sensors, light sensors, motors, and LEDs. Users of the kit build interactive fashion and accessories, instead of the robots they’d likely build with a similar kit like Lego Mindstorms. Soft, wearable artifacts are made by stitching sewable components together with silver-plated, electrically conductive thread. Figure 1 shows a picture of the kit and a sample design, a jacket with sewn-in turn signals for biking.



Figure 1. The LilyPad Arduino kit and a sample construction.


3. Methods
In an ongoing series of workshops and courses we have been using the LilyPad to engage middle- and high-school students (ages 11-18) in computing and electronics. In each course, students learn basic circuitry and programming and then design and construct an interactive garment that is demoed to friends and family at an exhibition/fashion show. Figure 2 shows images from a few of these sessions.



Figure 2. Examples of student constructions


4. Findings
One of the most interesting outcomes from these experiences was our ability to attract voluntary participation from large numbers of young women, who—once they arrived in workshops—adopted engineering skills with gusto to complete functional and sophisticated designs (Buechley et al., 2008; Buechley & Hill, 2010).

5. Scientific significance of work
We believe that cultural factors, more than a lack of aptitude or intrinsic interest, make computer science inaccessible and unappealing to many students. By making computation more accessible and building computers that look and feel different from traditional ones—computers that are fuzzy, colorful, and feminine, for example— we can begin to change and broaden the culture of computation. We can begin to get a diverse range of people excited by the ways that computers can be used to build beautiful, expressive, and useful objects that are different from anything that has been built in the past.

Author

• Leah Buechley, MIT Media Lab