The Arts Council of Wales is working on a special creative scheme for education and I happened to discover this initiative thanks to a blog post by Creative Practitioner, Guy Evans. Guy is part of the scheme, bringing open-source hardware to students at the Brynmawr Foundation School with the theme of data, music and light. One of the projects they’ve been working on is the Piano Glove, a glove that can translate colors into fun sounds and light. If you are an Adafruit fan, you will recognize this project involving a FLORA microcontroller, color sensor, sound board and Neopixel. The team at the school has been making excellent progress with the project.
We had to visit the Adafruit website in order to add the Flora board to the Arduino software IDE as it was not listed as standard, but when this was completed we just uploaded the code, connected some headphones to the audio out jack on the prototype board and began testing….It worked perfectly! The colour sensor was checking the RGB (Red, Green and Blue) values of the colours we placed below it and the neopixel (colour LED light) mimicked the colours which were being selected. The sound output was set to default and we hope to test out some more of the sounds over the coming days!
Another team of students at the school is working on Musical Painting, creating mixed-media art that will trigger recordings. They are expanding their understanding of electronics with conductive materials such as foil, copper and ink. I hope you will check out Guy’s blog to learn about the other projects that are happening under this new style of learning. Interested in doing the Piano Glove in your classroom? We’ve got the learning guide to bring color, sound and light into your curriculum. Let students discover the connection between open source and collaboration.
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