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The LilyPad Arduino: using computational textiles to investigate engagement, aesthetics, and diversity in computer science education

Published: 06 April 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The advent of novel materials (such as conductive fibers) combined with accessible embedded computing platforms have made it possible to re-imagine the landscapes of fabric and electronic crafts--extending these landscapes with the creative range of electronic/computational textiles or e-textiles. This paper describes the LilyPad Arduino, a fabric-based construction kit that enables novices to design and build their own soft wearables and other textile artifacts. The kit consists of a microcontroller and an assortment of sensors and actuators in stitch-able packages; these elements can be sewn to cloth substrates and each other with conductive thread to build e-textiles. This paper will introduce the latest version of the kit; reflect on its affordances; present the results of our most recent user studies; and discuss possible directions for future work in the area of personalized e-textile design and its relation to technology education.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '08: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2008
1870 pages
ISBN:9781605580111
DOI:10.1145/1357054
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 06 April 2008

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Author Tags

  1. computational textiles
  2. construction kits.
  3. e-textiles
  4. electronic textiles
  5. lilypad arduino
  6. smart textiles
  7. wearable computing

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CHI '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 157 of 714 submissions, 22%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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