Planet Arduino

Arduino Verkstad has just started CTC* Catalunya 2015 in Barcelona with David Cuartielles preparing a group of 200 teachers that will be teaching CTC to students in Cataluña next September. A technology fair will be hosted at the end of the program and we are expecting more than 2500 people to attend.

Creative Technologies in the Classroom (CTC) is a collaborative learning curriculum designed for schools that wish to incorporate emerging technologies into their existing technology classes. It’s also a collection of experiments aimed at transforming the way technology is taught in schools around the world. These experiments introduce basic concepts in programming, electronics, and mechanics.These experiments introduce basic concepts in programming, electronics, and mechanics.

Thanks to the Departament d’Ensenyament of the Generalitat de Catalunya and our partner eduCaixa Obra Social “La Caixa” who is also involved with launching CTC for 75 schools in Andalusia in the fall. Stay tuned with Arduino Verkstad blog for news on CTC Andalucía.

Last year’s show included over 240 projects, which means we’ll probably have twice as many for this year’s show. This is the second edition of the program and it will reach 103 schools; we expect about 2.500 students to be involved in the project and the final fair will be at CosmoCaixa Museum in Barcelona on February 6th, 2016. Since the numbers promise a lot and the amount of people participating might be big, we will need the whole temporary exhibition space at the museum to be booked for the fair!

Click here for a press article on the teachers’ training in Barcelona. (in Catalan).

The news was originally posted on the Arduino Verkstad Blog.

Creative Technologies in the Classroom* gives us a lot of joy whenever we visit students’ fairs. Each iteration of CTC (Madrid, Castilla, Barcelona and so forth) has its own technology fair and it is meant to award and congregate students and their projects. Arduino Verkstad, teachers, school and government representatives join as well to celebrate and share what students have learned along the program.

This year is the third edition of CTC Castilla and the fair had 140 projects, 936 students and 70 teachers. We have noticed that:

• Teachers learned along with the students since they are not reproducing the CTC projects as the final projects, they have innovating by bringing new ideas
• We got told that teachers are forced by the students to open the labs late after school hours because they want to spend more time working on their projects
• Students have become pretty good at pitching projects, not only their production is excellent, but also their presentation skills

Some of the most impressive projects are:

A robotic hand controlled from a phone that even had an app with the sign language alphabet so that the hand would “talk” for you, and an R2D2 made of recycled materials. All the pictures and many videos of the projects can be seen here. Thanks to Centro Regional de Formación del Profesorado, Castilla La Mancha and congratulations to all CTC participants!

*Creative Technologies in the Classroom (CTC) is a collection of experiments aimed at transforming the way technology is taught in schools around the world. These experiments introduce basic concepts in programming, electronics, and mechanics.

(The news was originally posted on Arduino Verkstad blog by Laura Balboa)

We are happy and proud to announce that  David Cuartielles, co-founder of Arduino and CEO of Arduino Verkstad, got this year’s prize from the Swedish Electrical and Computer Engineers’ National Association (Svenska Elektro- och Dataingenjörers Riksförening) SER. The association awards an engineering student and a senior engineer that works with electrical, data and IT technology. The senior engineer has to lead an important role in smart and sustainable technological development:

This year the award goes to David Cuartielles from Malmö University for his open source platform Arduino, which is based on easy to use hardware and software to develop interactive projects.

This award – David said – has been possible thanks to the kind support of the Arduino family, Malmö Högskola and most importantly, the open source community.

Arduino Verkstad is partner of the Nordic Internet of Things Hackathon 2015 organized in collaboration with Mobile Heights & the MVD Project and taking place April 10th-12th, 2015 in the city of Lund Sweden. Programmers, interaction designers, professionals and enthusiasts  are invited to a 50-hour competition for attendees from any part of the globe no matter their technical skills on two topics: Smart Transportation or Smart Home.

The great news is that the organisation is ready to pay travel expenses to up 10 teams from outside Sweden. You can submit your idea or project proposal within the Hackathon’s framework and if it gets accepted they will fly you here to compete against the other teams.

Read more about it at this link

Next weekend Arduino Verkstad in Malmö  is organizing a one-day workshop in collaboration with Sony Mobile to experiment on programming from the Arduino IDE on Sony SmartWatch.

You don’t have to be a programmer to participate because this is low level hacking and if you, for example, are interested in graphic design or interaction design this might be something for you. Participants will work in groups and get tutoring throughout  to test the watch and modify it  on custom ideas.

The hands-on event will take place saturday 15th of June from 12 to 18 at STPLN in the city of Malmö (Sweden) . There is a limited amount of spots for the event and you can sign up by sending an e-mail to s.zetterdahl [at] arduino.cc no later than Friday the 14th of June.

In order to prepare grouping, please add some info on your technical background and language spoken (English/Swedish/Spanish). Attendance is for free and they will serve lunch and coffee.

The event is hosted in association with STPLN and Fabriken