Arduino the Cat, Breadboard the Mouse and Cutter the Elephant from hmt on Vimeo.
Media artists and design houses around the world: you’ve got nothing on this group of eight to eleven-year old English girls, bravely exploring interaction design, soft toy hacks, and physical computing using the open source Arduino platform to animate cats, mice, and elephants.
Just how comfortable are these kids with technology? Comfortable enough that a robotic, killer elephant with glowing eyes is “cute.”
Give them a couple of decades, and I think they’ll invent Cylons. I can’t wait.
Thanks to Kyle McDonald and Memo Akten for sending this my way. As Kyle puts it:
Metaphor: "Could you put it in it’s head like a brain?"
The joy of interactive art: "Ah, that’s so cool!"
The joy of conceptual art: "I love diagrams!"
Hacking consumer devices: "We could just attach it to a remote control car."
Developing scripts: "When sensor is deactivated by…"
The frustration of similarity: "My idea was to do a walking dog!"
There is so much here. This is like the entire media art scene rolled into one six-minute video.
Brilliant.
Now I have to sing “I believe that children are our future…”
More information: Seaweed Studio Workshop
They add in that blog post:
It was interesting to see the contrast between the two groups – the younger ones appear to me more cautious to stay within boundaries of what they have previously seen as they worry about many things being ‘impossible’, which for me was quite unexpected. They had less patience with trying to learn the technological parts, although had a good idea of how the flow of action should be for their ideas. Given a slower teaching pace and a more graphical interface, I believe they would have gained much more control over what was happening.