Inspiring stuff with hacking and making in Barcelona

I went to the first European Scratch conference held in Barcelona last week, at the Citilab, an open space for citizens to get their hands on technology. Mitch Resnick, the inventor of Scratch at MIT was there.  Here are some of the highlights from the event.

Firstly, Jacob, a teenager who runs his own club to teach about programming with Scratch.

“My name is Jacob Weinbren and I’m 13 years old. My presentation will explain how my friends and I set up and ran a Scratch Club for three years. It will outline the problems we had to overcome, and the benefits of running the club.” More info on Jacob…

David Cuartielles the co-founder of the Arduino platform, a “a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer.” He gave a really great keynote. I can’t find his presentation online at the moment, but he explained about the very cool Complubot project he ran in schools around Madrid. It gave teachers and students the chance to get their hands on some fun robotics projects – the Complubot blog in Spanish shows what they were doing. This video interview with David from MakerFaire gives more info on the new Arduino robot, an entry level robot that newcomers can easily get up and running.

Clive Beale from Raspberry Pi Foundation explained some fun projects done by students using Raspberry Pi, a tiny cheap computer for children to experiment with. One of my favourites was “marshallows in space”, designed by another smart 13 year old, Jake, in the UK. He sent a Raspberry Pi plus marshmallows into near space, using a balloon capsule attached to a GPS and pressure sensor. “The Pi was used to record the balloon’s coordinates, speed, altitude, heading, and pressure data throughout the flight on an SD card,” says Jake’s father.  “My son used this data in his experiments.” The aim was to look at the effect of pressure on the marshmallows – the photo below shows three marshmallows and a grape at 55,999 feet.

There’s lots more interesting posts, examples and people working with Scratch, Arduino and Raspberry Pi over on the Scratch conference website.  I hope this is the first of many Scratch conferences in Europe!