We love finding and sharing studies and projects that explore the relationships between education and technology and the open-ended possibilities of how we might better our world. Most recently we wrote about the Pas a Pas, an interactive educational tool that uses touch interface to teach geometry through stop motion animation. But one of the earliest and most popular inventions in this area was the Arduino, a revolutionary open-source electronics prototyping platform that was originally designed to help students build their interaction design projects more cheaply.According to their website:Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators. The microcontroller on the board is programmed using the Arduino programming language (based on Wiring) and the Arduino development environment (based on Processing). Arduino projects can be stand-alone or they can communicate with software on running on a computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP).The Arduino is a useful tool for artists, designers, hobbyists, or anyone interested in creating multi-sensory objects and environments. Thanks to them, we could build our own mini-versions of Muti Randolph artworks.Six years after the birth of the [Arduino]( http://www.arduino.cc/ Arduino)—which is now distributed almost worldwide—the developers Rodrigo Calvo and Raúl Alejos released a documentary sponsored by Laboral Centro de Arte in Gijon, Spain, about the tool’s conception, history, and how the Arduino continues to impact people and their projects around the world. The guys are producing the DVD, but the movie is licensed under a CC-SA 3.0 License and can be viewed online and distributed by anyone.Image courtesy of Narbotic.net.
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