Nwanua Elumeze

Electronic/computational textiles and children's crafts

An astonishing array of new technologies is currently effecting a revolution in the professional design of textile artifacts. This integration of electronics and computation into textiles likewise suggests new directions in the practice of childrens crafts. In this paper, we present a classification scheme that we believe will prove useful in structuring exploration and discussion of new directions in childrens textile-based crafts. Within the context of this classification scheme, we describe several projects in our lab (along with early pilot-testing efforts) that offer examples of how children can work with computationally enriched textiles. We conclude by describing several extremely exciting-but nonetheless plausible-scenarios for continued work in this area.

Towards a curriculum for electronic textiles in the high school classroom

This paper proposes a curriculum for a high school e-textile course-a curriculum rooted in our experiences in developing an e-textile construction kit and in holding several courses and workshops with these materials. The paper briefly describes the e-textile kit and reports on our teaching experiences, reflecting on the relationship between the evolving tools and curriculum and our user experiences.

Children's programming, reconsidered: settings, stuff, and surfaces

The subject of childrens programming has long been a vexed and controversial one in the field of educational technology. Debates in this area have typically focused on issues such as how to create a child-friendly programming language; or whether children can learn particular topics (e.g., recursion) in programming; or indeed, whether it is worthwhile for children to encounter programming at all. For the most part, these debates have taken place against an implicit background of assumptions about what childrens programming looks like--namely, an activity focused on creating effects on a desktop screen or, occasionally, robotic toy. This paper argues that the cultural and anthropological contexts of childrens programming are now poised to change: that new programming materials, physical settings, and unorthodox display surfaces are likely to shift the nature of the childrens-programming debate in profound ways, and to make programming a far more informal, approachable, and natural activity than heretofore. We illustrate this argument with projects underway in our own research.

SmartTiles: mobility and wireless programmability in children's construction and crafts

This paper presents a working prototype of a mobile, programmable set of construction kit elements for children. SmartTiles are small, lightweight, independently programmable tile objects that can be combined to cover various sorts of planar surfaces; each touch-sensitive tile contains its own computer and LED, and communicates with its neighboring tiles when placed on an appropriate background material. Collectively, the tiles enact user-customizable cellular automaton programs and thus display complex and fascinating dynamical patterns of light. In this paper, we discuss the implementation of SmartTiles and explore their potential use as an instance of mobile computation for children. We also discuss the way in which the tiles can be programmed wirelessly via a PDA interface, and discuss the implications of this sort of programming for educational computing more generally.

A tangible construction kit for exploring graph theory

Graphs are a versatile representation of many systems in computer science, the social sciences, and mathematics, but graph theory is not taught in schools. We present our work on Graphmaster, a computationally enhanced construction kit that enables children to build graphs of their own and investigate their properties by experimenting with algorithms that operate on them. The system is distributed; microcontrollers inside each node execute an interpreted language in parallel. Graphmaster, with its magnetic connectors, illuminated edges, and capacitive sensing, encourages children to develop intuitions about connectivity long before they are introduced to the notation and formulas of graph theory.

Toward Child-Friendly Output and Fabrication Devices

Computer-controlled fabrication – the design and “printing” of tangible, physical objects – has seen an explosion of interest and excitement in the past several years. Three-dimensional printers, laser cutters, paper-cutting devices, computer-controlled sewing machines, milling machines, and the like have become increasingly affordable, and now permit users to create a remarkable range of physical objects in a wide array of materials. Strangely, however, this “explosion” has thus far largely ignored the remarkable potential of physical production and fabrication by children. This is a surprising oversight. After all, children’s crafts – the landscape of activities and materials that have traditionally been associated with educational construction – represent fertile ground for experimentation with novel, innovative computer-controlled fabrication devices and materials. This chapter describes a number of imaginative possibilities for such devices, blending the most expressive and content-rich aspects of children’s crafts with the powerful affordances of computer-controlled fabrication. As an example, we describe one “home-grown” prototype device, StringPrinter, designed for creating custom-decorated lengths of yarn and string for children’s craft projects. StringPrinter is not the exclusive focus of this chapter, but rather an illustration of a more general idea: it represents one (still-early) step in a much broader research agenda of creating fabrication hardware, software, and web-based systems for use by children. We use this example as a foundation for exploring much broader questions in the enhancement of children’s craft activities.

Scheming textiles: End-user programming for wearables

This paper attempts to expand the landscape of wearable computing with button-schemer, an ldquoambient program readerrdquo that can be used to input program code directly from a computer screen or from specially bar-coded surfaces. The placement of programs for such a device can be made informal, creative, and practically ubiquitous, suggestive of ways to extend the traditional notions that wearables are to be worn, but not programmed away from a desktop computer.