I subscribe to the Tiny House Blog where I spotted this video. 16-year-old Austin Hay of Santa Rosa, California gets my personal Tiny House builder award for his project. He’s been working on his tiny house for two years and still has a way to go. He plans on taking it off to college as his living space in two more years. 

My favorite section begins at 6:07.

I’ve been collecting the trash I produce with this. If it’s recycleable, I recycle it, but otherwise it goes in here…this is a year and a couple months of trash. So far I only have one and a half garbage cans full. This is the insulation foam (shows a canister), this is the Tyvek housewrap that I couldn’t use. If I can’t use it, it goes in here. Obviously not much.

The smaller, the less trash you make. People who do big construction work for big houses, they get dumpsters full and haul them off. This one you don’t even need a dumpster.

I love the walk-through of the house-in-process that follows the trash sequence, beginning at 6:59. He shares the space he’s creating, bringing it alive with his narrative and gestures.  

Austin closes the interview with this:

It’s very peaceful and quiet. I have my own sense of domain in here. It’s a big accomplishment for me.

(Get this young man the Master Builder Maker and the Minimal Waste Maker Badges, quick). 

The Brightworks Arc – Exploration, Expression, Exposition

Everything is interesting. We can build anything.

I wrote here about Tinkering School Summer Camp in August, 2010. More than a few people who read it said to me “I’d like to go to Tinkering Camp year round.” And now they (or at least their kids) can….Tinkering School founder Gever Tulley has teamed up with A Curious Summer director Bryan Welch to launch Brightworks – with the ambitious and full-of-promise tagline “an extraordinary school” – in San Francisco. The San Francisco school joins a growing network of satellite Tinkering Schools in Austin, Chicago and soon to be, Buffalo–see the Buffalo Tinkering FB page here. Brightworks is the first year round school in the Tinkering network.

Anticipated to launch in September, 2011, they have designed the K-12 curriculum around a series of arcs, lasting from 2 weeks to 2 months.

Each arc takes as its premise a central theme, to be explored from multiple perspectives. Students interact with this theme in three different phases: exploration,expression, and exposition

The founders have written a very clear declaration that this model is rooted in a designerly approach to learning, what Bryan Welch calls curatorial learning on A Curious Summer’s website. 

Brightworks does away with tests, grades and homework, instead supporting each student as they create a rich and detailed portfolio of their work. 

I appreciate the choice of words on the Chicago site (emphasis is mine):

• Tinkering School is a place where children are given abstract open-ended building projects and problems. 
• Trained to use the tools required for success, they have the freedom to fail and the time to persevere.
• A failure-positive atmosphere allows children to play in the face of adversity.
• The use of real tools to tackle real problems creates a unique atmosphere of trust and responsibility.
• Children work at their own pace with the adults tilting projects and timelines toward completion.

Expect to be reading more about Brightworks and the evolving Tinkering School Summer Camp network. I’ll be making it an ongoing focus.  

An R&D Lab for your kitchen table

I know you’ve been waiting for it. ;D     

Well, it’s here at last…Arduino The Documentary, directed by Rodrigo Calvo and Raul Alaejos, produced by Gustavo Valera. Interviews with the project team trace the early inspiration and evolution of a project that extends Open Source beyond the typical software domain to create an inexpensive physical computing platform that anyone can use to tinker, design and create interactive objects. DIYers show how they’re using Arduinos to dream an amazing array of inventions into being, and educators share their experiences using Arduinos with high school students, bringing concepts like prototyping and iterating to life.

Wow, a lot of people are starting to talk about this. I should check it out. And I got one of the boards and I said, ‘Wow, this is fantastic, beginners are gonna love this. It runs on Mac, it runs on PC, it runs on Linux…this is exactly what everyone wants…This is a fantastic tool for getting people doing the things that they want to do with electronics. Not necessarily learning everything first, but getting the application done, like I want something…I want my dress to blink. Very hard to do if you just want to learn electronics; with an Arduino, you get that done in a few minutes. 

Phil Torrone, former Senior Editor, MAKE, currently Adafruit.com

In the documentary, Massimo Banzi on the Arduino team calls Arduino “Processing for the hardware.” 

For those of you new to Arduino, Make Magazine calls Arduino “an R&D lab on your kitchen table for prototyping any gadget.” Make’s newest issue, Vol. 25, is devoted to Microcontrollers and Arduino. The Make project site has a section devoted to Arduino that includes how to make a Yobot, an Arduino yogurt maker, and Garduino, an Arduino microcontroller for indoor gardening.

Favorite quote

What we’re trying to do is Open Source EVERYTHING! 

Zach Smith, Makerbot

Half way through the piece, Zach Smith shows off his Open source 3D printer made with multiple Arduinos–the Makerbot Thing-o-matic— and gives us an enthusiastic preview of the Open source 3D printing revolution–starting with a whistle, bottle opener, and a coat hook. I admire his spirit.

Visions for the future and education

Teacher Juan Carlos de Mena is shown doing hands-on Arduino musical instruments with his high school students.

It is an amazing tool for getting young people this age in contact with all an awful lot of realities they live in. First to get them to learn that the consumer side–this ‘use the remote with the machine’ side–is not the only one; that it is possible to understand what’s inside and get the control back. Because now all these things have a huge amount of gadgets which they have no idea how they work at all. With Arduino you can get a small glimpse of how all this stuff works, show them some schematics that allow them to have a certain way of looking at all the technological worlds that are going to surround them. And it is also quite funny – it can be used to teach electronics, to teach them how to think, it teaches them how to have less short-term projects and work as a team, how to participate in a community, get information. 

Juan Carlos de Mena, Madrid

It took Nathan Seidle a while to wrap his head around the idea when the Arduino team first approached him to carry Arduinos in the SparkFun store. Today, SparkFun has sold over 40,000 Arduino boards. Nathan is encouraged by the possibilities of students learning microcontrollers at a much earlier age.

I did not learn micro controllers until my middle years in college, until the end of college. And I was really blown away by how easy it is to use Arduino, namely, being the forerunner development board. I think, given the right series of events, if Arduino and electronics could be taught in high school, I think there’s a big future for not only engineers, but also artists. Also digital media interactive design people. If they can learn that in high school, imagine how much more they can do in later life. 

Nathan Seidle, SparkFun.com

And citizen scientist Sonaar Luthra points to the possible long term contribution of Arduino to design education…

The potential for students when they’re just learning how to use the computer, to learn how to make things with computers…to me that…that’s powerful. And what that would actually mean long term for students with only $50, to be able to plug something into their computer and make something with it over and over again and iterate it and share it. The type of creative community that can engender in young people to me I think that is…that’s going to change everything…and I’m really excited to see what happens as it develops.

Sonaar Luthra, cofounder, CEO, Water Canary

The Arduino team has two Twitter streams – @arduinoteam and @arduinoblog. Team is where they share cool stuff for the community. Blog is where you can keep up with latest blog posts.

They are opening a shiny new Arduino Community Forum on January 24.