When I was about my daughter’s age, my parents brought home an Apple II+ computer, because they were convinced that computers would be very important in the future, and the more we learned about them the better off we’d be. One of the original hacker/maker communities grew up around those machines, and I met a lot of great people and learned a lot playing with it. I’m glad to see that there are other communities of similarly minded people around today who might start my children out on their own voyages of discovery.
It’s still hard to believe sometimes that I now routinely carry around in my pocket more computing power than existed in the entire world when we first put a man on the moon. I can now sew together a toy for my son that has more computing power than that Apple II had, and it’s small and light enough for him to wear on his head, and hardly notice it’s there unless when it warns him that somebody’s trying to sneak up behind him.
I did grow up with technology, but when I was a child it was still something that needed to be worked on. Most of the technology available today comes ready to use, designed with bright colors and happy sounds, and ready to entertain. To me, the Gemma is a step back to the technology of my childhood, where opening the box only gives you a beginning – to get to the end result, you need to learn about computers and electronics, and design and build something that’s unique. It’s more of a tool than a toy, and it’s up to the user to decide how it’s used. I like that Gemma doesn’t tell you how to use it – that you need to make that up yourself. Too few things today do that.
I originally intended that my participation in this challenge should be an introduction to practical electronics that my children would enjoy, and hoped that they would participate more than they ultimately chose to.
They really enjoyed the planning, and are now having fun with the finished hats, but they wanted very little to do with the work involved in the creation of the hats.
Although it didn’t go the way I’d planned, I still consider the challenge a success. We have a plan for creating an improved version of the Dog Safety Hat, and my daughter is already asking whether we can change the blinking pattern of the current hat (presently random) to something more structured, so I’m hoping I can convince her to help me re-write the code. My son is planning to show off his hat to all of his friends, and maybe we can build on that interest now that he’s got something to play with.
When the vibration sensors for the Treasure Map Hat weren’t sensitive enough to register footsteps, and when the Dog Safety Hat doesn't work as well on a dog as it does on a person, we learned that things don’t always go as planned, but when we took the Treasure Map Hat parts and used them to build the Spy Hat we learned that a failed plan can still yield good results.
As old as I am, I learned some new things too. Sewing with stainless thread is more difficult than I’d thought, and I should have taken more time with the layout before I started sewing. I did think about separating the power and ground lines on the Dog Safety Hat, but didn’t think about planning so they wouldn’t need to cross. If I make more wearable items, I’ll do better in the future. As usual, I had more fun thinking about different kinds of things to make than I did making them, but it was still a lot of fun to make them.
I also enjoyed seeing what other people were making – there are a lot of talented people posting their creations, and I think everyone deserves to win! I haven’t read all of the other posts yet, but I’m planning to go back this weekend and see what challenges and revelations everyone else had.
I believe my children will take away more from this challenge than I can see right now, and hope it’ll lead to further interest in designing and building their own projects, but at the very least, they now have fashionable and functional hats that they can wear to next year’s Maker Faire, and can speak intelligently about the design and construction process.
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