Philadelphia Schools explore the learning connection between Making & Writing

Teachers & students as Makers - Taking "How To" to the next level

Including a reference to Dale Dougherty of Make magazine

Sparkfun's 2 Day E-Textile Workshop this weekend!

SparkFun is in for a special treat on the weekend of January 15th! Our E-Textile guru, Lynne Bruning, has arranged an awesome Two Day E-Textile Workshop: Where Electronics Meet Textiles at Sparkfun headquarters. Not only will you learn all about electronics, textiles, computers and fashion, you will meet colleagues, innovators and leaders in the rapidly evolving landscape of wearable computing.

Troy Nachtigall will be visiting us from Florence, Italy to share his expertise in E-Textiles. He is a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology and has worked with EU based Plug and Wear to develop E-Textile sensors, fabrics and wearable computing projects. Troy teaches courses in Fashion and Technology at the University IUAV of Venice, University Sapienza of Roma, the Institute of European Design, and ISIA Firenze.

Also joining them will be Special Guest: Nwanua Elumeze, founder of Aniomagic, who will share his company’s hardware advancements in eTextiles. http://www.aniomagic.com/store/index.php?p=2&q=16

Sunday will be devoted to creating a wearable technology project culminating in a uStream fashion show and live chat. Be sure to log in on January 16th at 4pm Boulder time!

See full post at http://www.sparkfun.com/news/512

Fun in the snow!

For those of you who are tired of the snow...try out what Sarah Angliss did..."For some Christmas fun, I added ten bright, white LEDs to the petticoat 0f this 1950s-style dress so I could move around parties in my own pool of light. You can see the dress in action in this video, taken in Brighton on a very snowy night in 2010. I was inspired by the electric ladies who used to perform in dresses festooned with lightbulbs, at the turn of the twentieth century."

"The LEDs are controlled by a Lilypad Arduino which lights them up in sequence. I’ve also connected a cheap accelerometer to the Arduino (just like the one you find inside an iPhone or Nintendo wii) so the circuit can tell when I’m moving."

Read her entire post and see her dress in action at: http://www.sarahangliss.com/exhibits/electric-dress

Arduino the documentary

Fascinating documentary by Rodrigo Calvo and Raúl Alaejos about Arduino open source software and how it came to be, along with the development of the boards into what is now a blooming field of opportunity for beginners.  No doubt you'll be familiar with some of the players interviewed...including David Mellis, graduate student in Leah Buechley's MIT High Low Tech Lab!

View the 28 minute documentary at: http://gizmodo.com/5734025/everything-worth-knowing-about-arduino

The documentary is also available at Vimeo (EN, ES) and it can be download from Archive.org (EN, ES). The file is licensed under CC-SA 3.0 and can be redistributed.

Smart Clothing

From University of Minnesota Fashion Design

http://www1.umn.edu/news/features/2010/UR_CONTENT_212784.html

Smart clothing

Technology expands what clothing can do

Lucy Dunne believes that before long we will see normal clothing that responds to our moods and needs.

Clothing that solves problems
Dunne, assistant professor of apparel design in the U of M's College of Design, says that technology is a way to better solve problems we deal with in regular clothing design.

Today's winter coat, for instance, is designed to simply trap body heat. "By using technology," she says, "you can actually be generating heat … maybe only when the person is actually cold. So then we’d have a garment that’s a little more dynamic or responsive."

Dunne is focusing on embedding sensors to get information about movement or position or physiological states. "You can imagine embedding [a sensor] into a knee brace that might be able to tell you: 'This is too far.' Or it could just detect what’s going on with your knee all day long and then feed that information back to your doctor."

Clothing that expresses moods
Smart clothing has a fun side. "If fashion is a spectacle," Dunne says, "then we want to use technology to get attention or to make a statement. … Your outfit could change in some way to reflect your mood."

A skirt she designed had fiber optics that twinkled when the wearer laughed.

"We are only in the exploration stages of the expression realm," she says. "The potential for the future is great."

Tags: College of Design