Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
At the level of today's technology consumer, there appears to be an increas-
ing desire to interface our technological power-machines to the real physical
world. And power-machines they are, our personal computers, tablets and smart
phones—equipped with highly advanced man-machine interaction technologies,
communication possibilities, location-determining hardware, acceleration sensors,
and more. However, for all their strengths and possibilities, they do not offer the
connectivity to the physical world around us that many dream of. No smart phone is
currently on offer that drives itself around the house to play with the cat. No tablet
is equipped with motors and sensors that make it suitable to steer a child's soap-box
cart. No current iPhone models have a user-accessible digital thermometer to play
with. And in a way, this is what we more-and-more expect our technology to do
(well, perhaps not exactly this, but similar things)—to connect our computational
devices to the physical world.
This desire to connect may have been always present, but there appears to be more
of a push towards closing the gaps between human and technology, by leveraging
technology in a more personal, private and autonomous manner, under control of the
user.
As a result, tinkering with digital/physical computing systems has gained much
attention over the last few years. For example, the Wiring (www.wiring.org.co)
and Arduino (www.arduino.cc) projects offer immensely popular tools for lower-
to intermediate-level software and hardware tinkerers (e.g. Thompson
2008
; Banzi
2008
), spawning thousands of interesting home-grown projects. Similar projects
are Raspberry Pi (www.raspberrypi.org), MaKey MaKey (www.makeymakey.com)
and, more in the creative coding domains, Processing (www.processing.org) and
OpenFrameworks (www.openframeworks.cc).
These initiatives gave rise to low-cost rapid prototyping tools that offer rich, if
not full functionality, while hiding complex underlying structures from the devel-
oper. The frequent open-source nature of the projects kindles what is, in essence, a
community-like support structure, and the ongoing generation of example code and
libraries. All this makes it possible for single medium-skilled developers to master
complex (physical) digital prototyping tools.
Observation 1
In recent years, physical and digital prototyping was fitted to the
scale of the individual. After years of increasing technological complexity in the
systems around us, the right combination of technological abstraction and openness
has re-empowered individuals to understand, own and prototype solutions to their
own problems and aims. This re-enables grass-roots technological development at a
greater scale.
We, the authors, are involved in a creative research-based academic program.
In this context, we incorporate tinkering with (physical-) digital prototyping tools
into our own education. From the above observation, our experiences, and from
our interest in scientific education, we present further observations on tinkering in
scientific education. Small parts of this chapter were published previously (Lamers
et al.
2013
).
