Squishy circuits

Johnson, Samuel A.; Thomas, AnnMarie

doi:10.1145/1753846.1754109

Cited by 39 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Material and artifact inquiries. We investigated the sound-making possibilities at the intersection of engineering practices with three kits (Figure 2): (1) littleBits KORG Synth kit, an electronic construction kit with magnetically connecting modules to quickly create and manipulate electronic sounds [40], (2) Playtronica Playtron, a MIDI controller that connects to a computer or smartphone to play instruments like a piano by connecting 16 outputs to conductive materials to create sounds [41], and (3) Squishy Circuits kit, which utilizes conductive playdough to build circuits with buzzers and motors with possibilities to create sounds [21,42,43]. During the material inquiry, we investigated whether and how different conductive materials could be used with the kits to expand engagement with engineering practices, such as considering multiple solutions for creating circuits while tinkering with the affordances and constraints of different conductive materials.…”

Section: Workhopmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personally Meaningful Design: Sound Making to Foster Engineering Practices with Artifacts from Home

Hurtado,

Leinonen,

Keune

2023

Sustainability

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Early engineering experiences can provide young people with experiences that can contribute to developing longer-term interest in the field and addressing dropout issues faced in engineering internationally. One way to engage young people with engineering is through the creation of personally meaningful sound-making projects with everyday materials and electronic kits. Sound making can make it possible for people to connect to their personal experiences and to represent these personal experiences through artistic means while also performing engineering practices, like asking questions, defining and delimiting problems, and developing and optimizing solutions with physical materials that produce sounds. Such design processes are referred to as engaging in the design of personally meaningful projects. However, it remains underspecified what personally meaningful means and, therefore, what aspects to integrate into engineering educational activity and technology designs to foster personally meaningful design opportunities. Building on constructionist perspectives on learning, this qualitative research investigated engineering practices as middle-school-aged youth used electronic construction kits and personal tangible material objects to create sounds. Iterative and thematic analysis of engineering practices of semi-structured interviews and video-recorded youth workshops showed that sound making with personal objects and electronic construction kits is a context for engineering design practices. This study also showed that integrating personal tangible projects that materialize personal histories can foster engineering practices. The findings contribute to our understanding of the theoretical idea of personally meaningful design in constructionism by presenting the importance of integrating personal histories through the design of personal projects with tangible material objects of a person’s life.

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Section: Workhopmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personally Meaningful Design: Sound Making to Foster Engineering Practices with Artifacts from Home

Hurtado,

Leinonen,

Keune

2023

Sustainability

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“…Educational research identifies teaching the underlying principles of science and technology as one of the biggest challenges and the available tools to support teaching conceptual learning remain under-explored [14,39]. DIY playful learning materials such as Squishy Circuits try to address these educational problems, but the capabilities are limited in the scope to galvanic contact and resistance [20]. In Flowcuits, we approach this problem by introducing a rapid and accessible prototyping method to build a variety of fundamental electronic components using liquid metal circuits along with hands-on interactions to explore and manipulate the functionality.…”

Section: Physical Computing For Playful Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are many physical computing toolkits designed to teach complex ideas to laypeople leveraging these positive characteristics [3,8,21,31,37,46]. Particularly, several do-it-yourself (DIY) toolkits available to easily learn and explore electronic designs through assembling and modifying modular components [9,20]. Commercially available open-source platforms such as Arduino, Teensy and Raspberry Pi also promote playful learning.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flowcuits: Crafting Tangible and Interactive Electrical Components with Liquid Metal Circuits

Tokuda

Sahoo

Jones

et al. 2021

Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction

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We present Flowcuits, a DIY fabrication method to prototype tangible, interactive and functional electrical components by manipulating liquid metals. The prototypes afford both physical and visual interactions to demonstrate the inner working mechanics of fundamental electronic elements, which enables tangible and playful learning. The fabrication process follows simple imprinting and sealing of fluidic circuits with a 3D-printed stamp on an accessible moldable-substrates such as 'Blu Tack'. Utilizing conductive gallium indium liquid metal, we demonstrated interactive and reconfigurable electronic components such as switches, variable resistors, variable capacitors, logic gates and pressure sensors. In this paper, we present the design analogy of Flowcuits, DIY fabrication approach including a parametric 3D stamp design toolkit and results from a technical evaluation. The stamps are printed with a low-cost 3D printer and all the materials are inexpensive and reusable, enabling Flowcuits to be easily used without any advanced lab facilities. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Ubiquitous and mobile computing; User interface toolkits; Human computer interaction (HCI).

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“…By combining what children learn and what they do for fun, exciting learning experiences can occur (Johnson and Thomas 2010). Children develop creative thinking techniques that are important to many fields, but particularly useful for learning science and engineering (Mcgrath and Brown 2005).…”

Section: Learning Through Playingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Diorama Project: Development of a Tangible Medium to Foster STEAM Education Using Storytelling and Electronics

Cools

Conradie

Ciocci

et al. 2017

Citizen, Territory and Technologies: Smart Learning Contexts and Practices

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Abstract. Children of the 21st century grow up in a world full of information and technology. Education should equip them with useful skills and competencies, allowing them to actively and effectively take part in a globalised society. Teachers feel the need for educational tools that support innovative teaching. To this end, this paper describes the development of The Diorama Project. This series of trans-disciplinary workshops combines familiar subjects, like language and art, with new topics such as programming and electronics, to foster valuable skills and knowledge in a more fun and tangible way. Pupils team up to write, record and tinker a story. Programmable electronics let their theatre plays come alive. An open source platform provides all the information for teachers to organise the workshops by themselves. They can use it to share their experience and knowledge with colleagues worldwide.

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Squishy circuits

Cited by 39 publications

References 3 publications

Personally Meaningful Design: Sound Making to Foster Engineering Practices with Artifacts from Home

Personally Meaningful Design: Sound Making to Foster Engineering Practices with Artifacts from Home

Flowcuits: Crafting Tangible and Interactive Electrical Components with Liquid Metal Circuits

The Diorama Project: Development of a Tangible Medium to Foster STEAM Education Using Storytelling and Electronics

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