ISSN 2236-5281

Technical Report INCoD/GQS.03.2015.E

Physical Computing Outreach at Exhibitions

Authors: Christiane Gresse von Wangenheim

Aldo von Wangenheim Fernando S. Pacheco

Miriam Nathalie Fortuna Ferreira

Version 1.0 Status: Final

Distribution: External December 2015

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© 2015 INCoD – Brazilian Institute for Digital Convergence

All rights reserved and protected under Brazilian Law No. 9.610 from 19/02/1998. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise.

Brazilian Institute for Digital Convergence

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Phone/FAX: +55 48 3721-9516 R.17 www.incod.ufsc.br

ISSN 2236-5281

Relatório Técnico do Instituto Nacional para Convergência Digital/ Departamento de Informática e Estatística, Centro Tecnológico, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. -- v.1, n.1 (2011).-- Florianópolis: INE, UFSC, 2011 -

Semestral Resumo em português

ISSN 2236-5281

1. Convergência digital. 2. Tecnologia da informação. 3. Informática na saúde. 4. Mídia digital I. Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Departamento de Informática e Estatística.

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Physical Computing Outreach at Exhibitions

Popularization of computing among the general public, especially children has become a growing concern. Today we need a public that is not only computing literate (knows to use Information Technology), but that is fluent in computing. A basic understanding of computational thinking and programming in order to be able to make informed decisions as well as to publicize career opportunities in computing is an essential skill nowadays. Therefore, teaching computing to kids in workshops, camps, online tutorials or within their school context has recently become a trend in education.

Alternative ways to popularize computing are exhibits at fairs or museums. Such exhibits offer the public an opportunity to engage in informal education. Unlike school, such settings are voluntary, open-ended and flexible in an entertaining way. They are often visited by families, couples or groups of friends as part of recreational activities and/or by school classes as a field trip. The advantage of such exhibits is that they can provide exciting experiences providing basic information and stimulate interest and curiosity in learning computing.

In order to be motivating and engaging, such exhibits need to provide interactive hands-on experiences, allowing visitors to explore and experiment computational thinking and/or programming by themselves. However, several factors have to be taken into consideration (Ucko, 1985). As visitors are free to choose where to go, what to do and for how long they want (unlike classroom settings), effective exhibits must be inviting and easy to understand (National Research Council, 2009) (Falk et al., 2007). A heterogeneous audience with no prior experience should be able to understand its purpose, scope, and properties almost immediately and without conscious effort (Allen, 2004). Furthermore, it must be engaging enough to hold the visitors’ attention and motivation throughout the interaction process (Humphrey et al., 2005) (Pekarik et al., 1999). It should also create further interest and the desire for continued learning in and out of school (Maton-Howarth, 1990). All of these issues must be addressed while keeping development and maintenance costs low (Horn et al., 2008). As part of our Initiative Computing at School (Computacaonaescola.ufsc.br, 2013) we created an exhibit to demystify physical computing (especially programming) and at the same time to motivate and stimulate interest in learning more about computing. We, therefore, designed an interactive hands-on exhibit that in a recreational way shows how easy and interesting it can be to create programs using visual programming in a few minutes in a drop-in setting. We designed the exhibit mainly focusing on elementary and middle school children, being interesting to adults of diverse backgrounds as well. In order to get the attention of visitors to the exhibit we exploit the richness and attractiveness of physical computing in a playful way through a large minion-shaped interactive programmable robot. The robot follows visitors with its eyes (sensing their presence through ultrasound sensors), lifts its arm to offer a banana and activates a fart gun lighting up a led and making noises (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVsh5Wyp-Ms).

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Figure 1. Interactive programmable robots at the exhibit

How does the robot work?

The robot is visually programmed either via a Scratch 2 (Scratch.mit.edu, 2007) or a Snap! (Harvey and Mönig, 2015) program and automated by an Arduino Nano microcontroller. In order to allow a better visualization of how things work and to facilitate understanding and learning, we developed two special tools for the construction and control of physical devices by Scratch-like programs:

• Scratchduino (http://www.computacaonaescola.ufsc.br/scratchduino): a Scratch and Snap! to Arduino communication server. It is an easy to use, multiplatform GUI-based program that acts as a bidirectional protocol translator that provides interoperability between the Scratch Extension Protocol and the traditional Firmata microcontroller protocol. It allows driving microcontrollers using Scratch or Snap! programs in an intuitive, flexible and easy way.

• Scratchboard (http://www.computacaonaescola.ufsc.br/scratchboard): a low-cost and easy to use Arduino Nano break-out board that allows to quickly build physical devices using telephone cable jacks and helps visualizing the structure and logic of the connections.

Scratchduino is an extension of the s2a_fm command line Scratch to Firmata protocol translator originally developed by Yorinks (2013). We developed Scratchduino in contact with both the original developers of s2a_fm and Snap! and also provided the Portuguese localization for the Scratch and Snap! Arduino Blocks and the Brazilian Portuguese localization for the whole Snap! programming language. This allowed us to employ Scratch and Snap! in physical computing family programming workshops in Brazil (von Wangenheim et al., 2015). Figure 2 illustrates the integration of these tools.

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Figure 2. Scratchduino/Scratchboard operating schema and Scratchduino GUI

Figure 3 illustrates the hardware parts inside the robot.

Figure 3. The robot from the inside

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Figure 4. SCRATCH program to control the robot

Visitors are invited by facilitators to create and run their own Scratch program in order to control a smaller version of the minion – a shaped robot that lights up his eyes, moves his arm, talks and sings.

Figure 5. Small version of the minion-shaped robot

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Both robots have been built in an inexpensive way by four researchers in less than 25 hours with a total cost of less than US$250 for the large robot and US$90 for the smaller one.

Figure 6. Making of the minion-shaped robot

Approx. cost in US$ Large robot Small robot Hardware parts Arduino nano 20.00 20.00 Servo motor 2.99 2.99 Ultrasonic sensors 8.49 -- LEDs 0.50 1.00 Speakers 16.00 -- Scratchboard 8.00 8.00 Cables 3.00 3.00 Robot costume PVC pipes 20.00 -- Bowls 10.00 -- Building toy (atto) -- 40.00 Plastic for 3 D printed parts 50.00 -- Foam 50.00 0.50 Felt 5.00 2.50 Styrofoam balls 4.00 -- Water gun 12.50 -- Cable 5.00 1.00 Paint spray 20.00 -- Zipper -- 0.50 Party glasses -- 2.99 Hot glue etc. 8.00 2.00 Total 243.48 84.48

Table 1. Cost of the robots

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Presentation at SEPEX 2015 We presented the exhibit at the Education, Research and Outreach Week (SEPEX) (http://sepex.ufsc.br) at the Federal University of Santa Catarina from 11 – 14th November 2015 in Florianópolis/Brazil. The SEPEX is one of the largest events for the popularization of science in the state of Santa Catarina (south of Brazil). During SEPEX our exhibit was visited by approximately 4,000 people, including many school classes from pre-elementary to high schools. Yet, as being open to the general public it was also visited by many parents with kids, university students and professors. We observed that our exhibit attracted especially girls (younger ones but also high school girls) who seemed especially hooked by the robot being costumed as a minion.

Figure 7. Visitors at the exhibit at SEPEX 2015 Using costumed robots seems to be an inviting way to attract visitors. We observed several kids asking at the entrance of the exhibition where they could find the minion. In fact, most

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visitors seem to have stopped first in order to look at the minion and then to find out what the exhibit was about. Regarding our learning goals, the program that controls the robots was straightforward enough for even smaller kids to understand simple commands. In addition, under the guidance of the facilitators, visitors were able to change the smaller robot actions trying out first programming experiences. The degree of engagement with the exhibit varied largely. Some visitors just enjoyed the ex-hibit taking a picture with the robot, or passively observed other visitors interacting with the exhibit. Some just were interested in getting to know about the exhibit, computing and/or our initiative. However, a large number in fact stopped by to actively interact to understand the program and to try out to change the robots actions by re-programming it. Visitors typically remained at the exhibit ranging from 1 minute to about 15 minutes. Some children also returned several times to continue exploring the exhibit. Measuring the satisfaction of visitors via a simple feedback terminal with four smiley buttons, the large majority of visitors that left their opinion considered the exhibit excellent.

Figure 8a. Opinionmeter Figure 8b. Visitor’s evaluation of the exhibit We also observed that the experience at the exhibit stimulates an interest in learning more about computing as many visitors (kids and adults) asked on how they could learn more through classes or workshops, as well as on how they could bring this into their schools. Our experience shows that offering such exhibits to the general public can be an inviting, ap-prehensible, engaging alternative for popularizing computing in an inexpensive way. Of course in such 5-minute experiences we do not expect people to learn how to code, and, therefore, we are less concerned with teaching complicated robotics and computer pro-gramming concepts than with giving visitors a positive, hands-on experience that might in-spire them to learn more about computer programming and robotics on their own. Our objec-

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tive is for visitors to walk away thinking: I programmed a robot today, I can do this, it was fun and I want to learn more about this!

Acknowledgements

Scratch and the Scratch web site have been developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. The development team included: John Maloney, Natalie Rusk, Evelyn Eastmond, Tammy Stern, Amon Millner, Jay Silver, Han Xu, Eric Rosenbaum, Karen Brennan, Brian Silverman, Andrés Monroy-Hernández and Mitchel Resnick. Snap! has been developed at the CS Department at UC Berkeley, mainly by Brian Harvey and Jens Mönig. Jens Mönig has been additionally supported by Miosoft and SAP. s2a_fm was developed and is supported by Alan Yorinks as a private project. We want to thank especially Alan Yorinks and Jens Mönig for fruitful discussions of different aspects of this project.

We want also to thank all students that helped during the exhibition.

This work was supported by the Google Rise Award and the CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico – www.cnpq.br), an entity of the Brazilian gov-ernment focused on scientific and technological development.

References

Allen, S. Designs for Learning: Studying Science Museum Exhibits That Do More Than Entertain. Science Education, 88 (S1), Wiley Periodicals (2004), S17-S33. Computacaonaescola.ufsc.br. 2013. Iniciativa Computação na Escola. Retrieved 30 November 2015, from http://www.computacaonaescola.ufsc.br Falk, J.H., Dierking, L.D., Foutz, S. (eds.): In Principle In Practice: Museums as Learning Institutions. AltaMira Press, Lanham, MD (2007). Gresse von Wangenheim, C. et al. Teaching Physical Computing in Family Workshops. Technical Report INCoD/GQS.04.2015.E, Brazilian Institute for Digital Convergence, Informatics and Statistics Department, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis/Brazil, 2015. Harvey, B. and Mönig, J. 2015. Snap! (Build Your Own Blocks) 4.0. Retrieved 30 November 2015, from http://snap.berkeley.edu/ Horn, M.S., Solovey, E. T., Jacob, R.J.K. Tangible Programming and Informal Science Learning: Making TUIs Work for Museums. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children, ACM New York, NY (2008). Humphrey, T. et al. Fostering Active Prolonged Engagement: The Art of Creating APE Exhibits. Left Coast Press, (2005). Maton-Howarth, M. (1990) Knowing objects through an alternative learning system. In S. Pearce (ed.) Objects of Knowledge (pp. 174–203). London: The Athlone Press.

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National Research Council: Learning science in informal environments: People, places, and pursuits. The National Academies Press, Washington, DC (2009). Pekarik, A. et al. Exploring Satisfying Experiences in Museums. Curator: The Museum Journal , 42, 2 (1999), 152-173. Scratch.mit.edu,. 2007. Scratch - Imagine, Program, Share. Retrieved 30 November 2015, from https://scratch.mit.edu/ Ucko, D. A. Science Literacy and Science Musem Exhibits. Curator – the Museum Journal, 28(4), 1985. Yorinks, A. 2013. MrYsLab/s2a_fm. Retrieved 30 November 2015, from https://github.com/MrYsLab/s2a_fm