Una Revolucio Educativa

I+C+i. A revolution of education?

the project

in the two years prior to my PhD in Copenhagen in 2013, I have collaborated intensely with Professor Sergi Jordà and the music technology group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF, Barcelona). As part of our collaboration, we were especially interested in the topic of technology-enhanced creative practices and worked on multiple projects that tackled this particular area of research from various angles. in 2012, we worked on the concept of “facilitating creativity via rapid prototyping of interactive user interfaces”, and decided to organize a workshop on around this particular idea.

 
 

the workshop

On the 21 of March 2012, together with Sergi and his group, I have co-run and co-organized a workshop on rapid prototyping and creativity at the CCCB. The workshop was called una revolucio educativa ("An educational revolution"). the workshop was mainly targeted towards teachers and practitioners. the scope of the workshop was to engage these scholars with technology that could facilitate and support individual, as well as collective creative practices. for this reason, we programmed an arduino uno board to allow for controlling the input of a computer keyboard using any material that has conductive capabilities.

 
 

the arduino HID interface

At the workshop, we used a technology that leverages the Arduino HID Shield interface. we used The Arduino HID shield to transform a simple Arduino UNO board into an interface that can generate keyboard inputs to a computer. then, we “hacked” the arduino pins from the HID Shield to allow for connecting any conductive material via electric cables.

As such, the conductive materials could be used in place of regular keyboard keys, and therefore allow users to create customized interactive input interfaces using any material that they liked, as long as this material was conductive.

At the workshop, some people used fruit, others aluminum, and others cups with water, to create fun interactive interfaces to control games or sounds. among the most interesting, a fruit synthesizer and a clock to play pacman.

The credits for the creation of the shield go to the two co-founders of protopixel Daniel Gallardo and Carles F.Julià.