Pathfinders Winter Institute 2021

Pathfinders Winter Institute 2021 - Paper circuits make use of familiar craft materials such as tape, paint, and stickers to build electronics projects that look and feel like paper, but can come to life through the power of circuitry and code. Learners can use these materials as a friendly on-ramp into a new world of technological making. Because paper is such a flexible artistic medium, combining it with circuits broadens ideas about what technology can look and feel like, helping to nurture artistic creativity and personal expression. In this workshop, you will learn to build expressive circuits on paper with easy to use electronic stickers, conductive tapes, and craft materials. You will then program these circuits to be interactive using the Chibi Chip microcontroller and Microsoft Makecode, a block-based programming language that runs on phones, tablets, or computers. Finally, you will apply these techniques to a choice of project design challenges, creating tangible paper models to interactively illustrate what they have imagined. Been there, done that? Ready to go deeper with paper circuits? Take your paper engineering ideas up a level with new papercraft techniques and microcontroller programming concepts. We will continue embedding mechanical elements to our work, touching on text-based coding in the process. Paper engineering plus physical computing plus mechanical automation can take your paper city from villages and hamlets in history to future cities off planet to infinite imagined hubs of humanity. Build a city that can support aspects of your content area!