Thursday, May 5, 2016

Final Project: Cosplay Playlist!











Monday, April 11, 2016

Building with Makey Makey

In light of last week's reading, New Opportunities for Interest-Driven Arts Learning in a Digital Age, this week we explored a tool that allows us to combine the arts with the digital: Makey Makey. This is a board that you hook up to your computer, and then you hook various conductive objects (e.g., metal items, food, water, even graphite patches drawn on paper) to the board with alligator clips, and these objects become keys for your keyboard or replacement mouse buttons. Since the hooked-up items work just like buttons on your keyboard or mouse, they work with anything on your computer, but we were encouraged to use them to interact with Scratch projects. I think this allowed us to strengthen the connection to our interests.

Since I'd used a Makey Makey with Play-Doh, food items like bananas, copper tape, and graphite before, I decided to look around the MILL during make time at the end of class last week to find other potentially conductive items. I noticed a jar full of metal bobbins and had an idea--why not hook up several sewing-related metal items? After all, sewing is something I'm interested in these days! Beside the bobbin, I found a needle, needle threader, and pin, and now I had enough items for all four arrow keys. I temporarily lamented the fact that the MILL doesn't have any pincushions to hold the needle and pin, but I found an alternative: a sponge paintbrush. Here are all four items, with the needle and pin lodged in the paintbrush, each one in an appropriate position for the arrow key I planned to hook it up to:

Hooking them up to the Makey Makey ended up considerably messier:
I then thought it would be clever to find a sewing-related Scratch project with which I could interact using these sewing-related metal objects that were now arrow keys. I searched the Scratch website until I found the Rainbow Sewing project, which features a needle that, when you put the "pen" down and control it with arrow keys, "sews" a line of rainbow "thread" onto the fabric-like background.
I found that the Makey Makey had trouble detecting when I was touching the pin and needle, and I had to squeeze them rather hard for the computer to react as if a key was pressed. They might have been too small to make an adequate connection to the circuit, or perhaps they were made of impure metal and were not conductive enough. Nevertheless, I managed to "sew" the following word on my screen (almost) entirely by using the sewing-related arrow keys:
I made a few mistakes because touching pins and bobbins is a little less precise than pressing arrow keys! But ultimately this experiment worked out, and I'm quite pleased.
I'm grateful this class and my lab's research in general has encouraged me to document my projects, such as through the photos and descriptions I post on this blog. The reading this week emphasized how important it is for youth to do the same with their art projects, and how we need to work together with youth to develop platforms to make it easier for them to do so. Scratch is nice because it is open to the "publication" of "draft" projects and works in progress, but it could be even better. It could have space for youth to journal the sources of their ideas, their design decisions, etc. One thing we have to keep in mind is that currently, online "success" is measured by the number of views/ likes/ shares a post gets. A work in progress is not likely to get as many of these as a completed project, so we need to find some other way to motivate the posting of works in progress.
While it did not turn out being relevant to my project this week (though it certainly was in other weeks!), I was glad to see that the reading emphasized the extent to which media properties inspire young people to make art, whether it's fanfic, fanart, or fan videos like machinima. Since I've been deeply embedded in online fandom for many years, I know this is true. A favorite movie, TV show, or anime can motivate deep dedication and tons of creative and critical work. My only concern--and this concern is shared in the reading--is that this kind of work tends not to be acknowledged in society. My favorite fan writers, translators, and artists do this entirely as a hobby. They need to seek income elsewhere. This is partially because copyright issues prevent them from making money off of a media property they do not own, but also because there's this unproductive attitude that fan work is not "serious" and that media posted online should be free to consume. I think we're missing out on a significant contributor to our economy by not properly acknowledging and paying for the real work these fan writers and artists do. In addition, a financial incentive would encourage more people to express themselves through digital art and share online.

Sunday, April 3, 2016

Electronics Plus Textiles

I've been working with e-textiles--electronics embedded into textiles--for all four years I've been here at IU. I've made many projects of my own and facilitated more e-textile workshops for youth and adults than I can count. Some of my work can be found at this blog maintained by researchers interested in e-textiles. Therefore, I'm very familiar with sewing e-textile circuits, and making another one would not have been very educationally meaningful for me. I was relieved when Kylie gave me the go-ahead to explore making something else in the School of Education's MILL Makerspace.

Keeping in mind the Buchholz et al. reading about "rupturing traditional gender scripts" around electronics, I wanted to find a way to use electronic parts in unexpected ways. But before I found the parts I wanted to work with, I had no idea how I was going to do this. Without intra-action with the materials, agency to create had not yet emerged. I didn't just "have" this agency before I was inspired by the materials. This really helped me to appreciate the new material feminism perspective introduced in Taylor & Ivinson and explained for the first time in a way I could understand and buy into in Anna's presentation (let me know, though, if any lingering misconceptions about it show up in this post!).

I looked through the bins of various electronic and mechanical parts that had been donated to the MILL space. There were lots of hard plastics and metals, sharp edges and wires--in other words, materials with masculine gendered histories. I settled on a turbine-looking thing attached to a motor (it actually reminded me a bit of a hair curler), and a heavy black plastic disc that also had a motor. I had no idea where these parts had come from originally or what they were used for. Without those preconceived notions, I was free to use the materials in a way that was based solely on emergent properties as I tinkered with them. Here are those two motorized parts:

I used wire strippers to strip the plastic coating from the turbine's wires. That done, I tested whether the turbine worked by holding two 3V coin cell batteries to the wires. The turbine indeed spun! What could I do with this that somehow incorporated textiles? As the turbine spun around, I had a vision of fabric attached to the top of it, draped around it like a skirt, which would hide the metal parts most of the time, but spin when the batteries were activated, like a dancer's skirt. As I was exploring these materials, I also found out that the turbine could be propped up on the black disc piece, by leaning against the disc's motor. That settled the mystery of the disc's role: it would be a platform.

I then ventured back out into the space to find non-electronic materials to incorporate into my project. The felt fabric everyone was using for their e-textile projects seemed too stiff to me to have the spinning effect I was looking for. So I settled on ribbons and sequin tape. I also found some electric tape in blue, my favorite color, to use to attach things together. Here's a picture of almost all the materials I used, which followed the material phenomenon of "magnetizing" to my workspace (a phenomenon that Anna has discovered in her Early Inquiry Project):

I used the blue tape to prop the turbine upright against the disc's motor, and taped the negative lead of the turbine's motor to the negative side of the batteries. The positive lead has to be held in place on the positive side of the batteries in order for the device to spin. I also cut strips of ribbon and sequin tape. I did not end up using the white tape.

Next I tried attaching the ribbons to the top of the turbine with clear Scotch-like tape, but it didn't work. So I used hot glue instead. Here's a photo of the final product next to the hot glue guns:

When I was done, I was quite vocal about how I had made a project that "ruptured gender scripts" around technology because it repurposed mechanical, practical, masculine-coded pieces into a beautiful, playful spinning toy that incorporated feminine-coded materials like ribbons and sequins. Here's a video of the device in action:

Don't ask me to explain what this thing is supposed to be! It kind of reminds me of a merry-go-round or one of those spinning swing rides at carnivals. The important point is I tinkered with materials, let their properties rather than their original intended uses speak for themselves, and disrupted gender scripts by combining traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine materials. The agency to create such a thing was only possible in the free and open context of the MILL, with its assemblage of materials that cover a wide range of high-tech, low-tech, masculine, feminine, electronics, and craft, all working in intra-action.

Monday, March 28, 2016

My Scratch Project

Ta-da! Here's the Scratch project I made this week:

As you can tell, I'm still a gigantic nerd!
This project turned out exactly how I wanted it to, and I'm very proud of it! So, what did it take for me get so invested in a programming project? Papert and Resnick et al. are right; making it personally meaningful and developing a relationship with the project really helps! The open-source nature that allows for "looking inside" and remixing Scratch projects also helped me reach my goal.

The project is a remix of a "fruit catching game," only instead of fruit, you try to catch Star Wars: The Force Awakens characters in a trashcan. You get points when you catch the movie's villain Kylo Ren (and lots of points if you catch the wild card, Anakin). You lose points if you catch Rey or Finn, because they are heroes and they don't belong in the trash! Every time you catch a character, you see a little message. The game starts out with 10 points. If you lose all 10 points, then it's game over. If you last all 105 seconds without losing all your points, then you win!

Almost every decision I made here reflects some sort of joke about the Star Wars fandom, and each joke has multiple layers of meaning. I intentionally made the project to include those jokes and because I knew other Star Wars fans would enjoy them. There's nothing I and the fandom love more than making fun of our problematic favorite wannabe-Sith lord Kylo Ren. My choice of "trash" as the theme has a long history in fandom. I'm not sure of its origins, but when a fan calls a character or a romantic pairing they like "trash," they're acknowledging both the problems with the character/pairing and their own silliness in liking them. So they're calling both the character/pairing and themselves trash. In addition, I've seen fannish blog posts calling Kylo Ren a "trashcan" because he wears a "trashcan" on his head, and he's also a whiny brat who needs to learn a lesson, so it's even more appropriate to associate him with trash. There are also these two Tumblr images that further inspired the idea, which I credited in my description of the project. All of the things Kylo Ren says when the trashcan catches him are somehow based on his character or are plays on his actual lines. They are all about how he belongs in the trash. Finn and Rey's lines are similar, except they chastise the player for putting them in the trash. Poking some fun at my favorite fandom right now was a great way to make a personal connection to the project and to motivate me to do it well.

As for the process, I was really grateful that Scratch lets you remix other projects. There's no way I could have coded this whole game from scratch! (pun intended) I searched for "catching game" on the Scratch website and found this game, called "fruit catching game." I thought my remix would mostly involve design work, i.e., modifying the sprite's costumes to be the Star Wars characters instead of fruit and junk food, replacing the player character with a trashcan, switching out the background for a more Star Wars-y one, etc. I also added one "say for 1 sec" block to each character sprite, so they would react with a speech bubble when they touched the trashcan sprite. All this was quite simple, especially since I've worked with Scratch a little in the past.

However, there were some things about the original fruit catching game that I didn't like much. For instance, all the fruit that scored you points (i.e., Kylo Rens in my game) fell from the left side of the screen, while most of the junk food that lost you points (Finn and Rey in mine) fell on the right, so it was too easy to just stay on the left until time was up, and avoid most of the junk food. To resolve this over-simplicity, I had to tinker around with the x-positions of the sprites. Just like the kids in Mindstorms tried different numbers for angles to see what would happen to the Turtle in LOGO, I also used trial and error on the x-position numbers, until I figured out that the negative numbers were for the left side of the screen, and the positive for the right, just as you would expect from a coordinate plane. I also found that the numbers went pretty high up, into the hundreds. I modified some of the numbers, but left others the same. It's still not quite as random as I'd prefer, but it's okay.

I also didn't like that the original game simply said "Game over" at the end without telling you if you had "won" or not, no matter how many points you had collected. The "Game over" made it sound as if you always lost. I wanted to make it so you really could lose if your score got too low, but if you got enough points by the end of the 105-second timer, you would win and see a "Congratulations" message. This required more advanced programming than I had ever done before in Scratch. I looked at the existing blocks on the stage. At first I tried to use the "lives" variable, but I quickly realized that the original programmer hadn't specified a real role for "lives," so I deleted that variable and all of its associated blocks. I used the score instead. To change the score to start from 10 rather than 0 (making it so you kind of have 10 "lives"), I had to change the starting score on all sprites to 10. This took some exploring to figure out why changing it for only the primary sprite (the trashcan) wasn't effective. I changed the original "Game over" message to "Congratulations! You took out the Star Wars trash!", and still had it appear at the end of the timer's countdown, but only if the score was greater than 0. This required the use of an "If-then" block and a green "greater-than" (>) operator. To make the "Game over" message appear when your score went below 0, I again had to use the "If-then" block and a green operator block, but it was "less-than" (<) this time. After this didn't work, I discovered that you had to drag the score variable into the green operator block, instead of typing the word "score." The last problem I ran into was that the "Congratulations" message would work if you won the game, but the "Game over" message that would stop the game before you reached the end of the countdown would not work. I clicked on the little question mark button (Block help) and opened the help text for the operator block. In looking at the example code they had there, I realized I had forgotten a "forever" loop! What a rookie mistake! I've programmed e-textile lights to flash forever so many times that I should have known better. After I added the "forever" loop to the "Game over" code, it finally worked. The "Congratulations" code doesn't have a "forever" loop. Instead it's programmed to appear after a "wait for 103 secs" block.

I really saw the benefits of Scratch's "remix" function. I learned things about variables and operators that I probably never would have if there were not already examples of them in the project I remixed. If I'd started from scratch, I probably would have made a much simpler project and would have stuck to those blocks I was already familiar with. Being able to remix, and having motivation through a personal connection to the topic motivated me to go beyond my comfort zone. This is the way learning should always work!

Monday, March 21, 2016

Toy Hacking

I live in a small apartment, and when I moved there, I didn't bring old toys with me from my parents' house. The only electronic item I could think to bring to class for Toy Hack day was a light-up Christmas decoration. I also brought a laser pointer and a cube with an LED in it, but I opted not to take those apart. None of the things I brought seemed very interesting, so I was glad that Kylie brought a few more for us to choose from. I picked out a few toys before settling on one. Here's a picture of all the items I was trying to choose from:

My Christmas tree, LED cube, and laser pointer are in the front-center-left. The three other toys I found in class were the shark car, a spy headband, and Darth Peanut M&M.
First I tried taking apart the Christmas tree. As I suspected, it was far too simple. I was able to twist the tree part off, unscrew the battery compartment, and easily remove the entire electronic module from the tree's base. It appeared to just be a single color-changing LED. I don't know what controlled its color-changing pattern. I didn't see a circuit board or anything programmable. Perhaps it was integrated into the LED itself. I was easily able to put it back together. In any case, I was unimpressed and wanted to try hacking another toy.

The "guts" of the light-up Christmas tree. The ring near the bottom was just hot glue, which was the only thing holding it all together at the top of the base.
I finally chose the Hot Wheels shark racecar. First I played around with it to see what it did. It had three buttons on top, each responsible for something different, like lights, growling noises, and one button that shot the car forward, with the shark's jaw moving up and down as the car drove. There had to be some pretty sophisticated electronics for all that to happen! Taking it apart, it turned out, required a whole bunch of unscrewing.

Look at all those screws! And that's just the bottom layer!
Inside, the toy gave up its secrets. I found buttons below the buttons on the outside, a circuit board, an LED, and a speaker. But the motor was in its own compartment, and I still wasn't sure how it worked. Remember how in my last post I said I didn't know how a motor made things move besides just directly spinning? I could see a single motor, but it was facing the wrong direction for it to be directly spinning the wheels. It was perpendicular to the axle rather than in line with it. I decided to focus on finding out how that worked, since I knew this was a gap in my knowledge of machines.

Well, it took a little more unscrewing and finagling, but I finally split apart the motor's compartment. And I had an exciting moment of realization that I'm sure a young Papert would have been able to relate to: Oh! Gears!

I never had an emotional attachment to gears the way Papert had as a child. I knew they could turn each other, but I never knew how they worked when attached to actual motors (maybe I should pay more attention to the gears in my bike!). The most surprising aspect of this discovery for me was that some gears were at right angles to each other, entirely changing the direction of the spin. That was how it was possible for a motor perpendicular to the axle to spin the axle!

This was an extremely satisfying discovery for me. I could finally appreciate why Papert's "object to think with" as a child had been gears. But I also realized a few other things. Electronic toys like this are not meant to be taken apart. I'm pretty sure I broke some plastic pieces in forcing open the motor's compartment, so I don't think I could ever properly put the shark car back together again. This difficulty and "black-boxing" of how the electronics work is greatly limiting to the kind of learning that can happen with these toys. They are not "construction kits" "designed for designers," as Resnick and Silverman put it. But they could be! If toy cars like this were modular, easy to take apart and put together again in a different way, with easy access to their electronic parts (i.e., no white compartment "black-boxing" the motor and gears!), then kids could learn so much more from these toys, and probably have even more fun!

Monday, March 7, 2016

Building a Scribbling Machine





First iteration

Second iteration

Broken motor wire :(



Monday, February 29, 2016

Digital Fabrication- 3D Printed Lightsaber







The red lasers!

The handle pieces!

The Force is strong with this one!




Oh no! D:



"Dear Diary,

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Online DIY Challenge




Here's what Dirk looks like, wearing the outfit I made:






I have improved the sword since this photo was taken!


Monday, February 15, 2016

Froebel's Gifts: Gift 2






Monday, February 8, 2016

Paper Circuit Lightsaber



And the inside:



Does that look Sith-y enough for you? :D

Saturday, January 30, 2016

Creative Learning Space: Bloominglabs





Part of Bloominglabs' large main space


Sunday, January 24, 2016




