From September Monday 19th to Wednesday 21st will feature the first Technical Studies class, an integral and important part of your Interactive Architecture Minor. The objective of this class is to make you acquire certain technical capabilities that will be very useful to you in the next months. For this reason, the class focuses on skills and technique rather than design.

During the first week we are going to introduce the Arduino prototyping platform. Arduino is a cheap, postcard-sized, electronics board that carries a microcontroller and presents it in a package that is easy to program and easy to interface. During the class you will learn how to program the Arduino using the C programming language and how to interface it with electronic components and systems. Compared to the computers that you use every day, the Arduino is refreshingly simple, but also quite challenging in its minimality. We will learn how to program the Arduino through a simple programming + electronics brief (make an electronic die).

You will be assessed and receive a grade on how well your program + hardware satisfies the brief. The grade will be part of your final assessment for the Minor, and it will also be an indication of how much we think you still need to learn in order to produce an adequate prototype & design by the end of the Minor.
Advanced programmers who already know everything about the Arduino will receive a different and adequately challenging brief. We will not let you rest on your recursive laurels.

In the week after this skill building execrsie you will apply the learned skill in a workshop (you will work in groups). Each group will produce an interactive object varied serially across one of dimensions of interaction. The objects themselves will be given, courtesty of the Hyperbody group, but their interactive behaviour will be your responsibility. You will be assessed again on the quality of the interaction and on your ability to make an interactive electronic prototype.