Start small, thinkbit
Arduino and edupunk, a great combination
Last week I met with Andrés Quezada and José Luis López Villén of Spanish social entrepreneurship project ThinkBit. Andrés is a final-year aeronautical engineer at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain, and played a key role in this project that caught the attention of the Telefónica Foundation. José Luis López Villén, Senior Manager for Strategic Alliances at Telefónica, Spain’s leading telecoms operator, is the project’s mentor. I liked the project so much, and identified so strongly with the ideas behind it, that it has become one of these projects you feel you have to tell the world about it.
So just what is ThinkBit? It’s a team of young people in the Spanish capital who have created an NGO using open hardware such as Arduino — and that in the near future will be using others such as Raspberry Pi — to give young people in deprived areas of Madrid help in learning disciplines such as robotics, electronics, and programming. The methodology is based on edupunk, a DIY approach that avoids structured classes and instead motivates participants by getting them to solve problems collectively.
The first stage of the project is built around a low-cost kit provided free to participants that contains an Arduino circuit board along with all the components and sensors needed to carry out several projects, at the same time facilitating access to a computer donated by companies to those participants (to be used in their schools) who do not own one. After a brief introductory session, a practice session that participants must work on independently is posted each week on the ThinkBit website with nicely detailed explanations and illustrated with photos and videos. The session contains also a further challenge. Students must send questions and videos made with their own cellphones, which enters them for a lottery where they can win Firefox OS smartphones and electronic components that will allow them to pursue more ambitious projects.
The results have provided a pleasant, if not entirely unexpected surprise: borderline drop-out students have suddenly been motivated to new levels of performance, developing new skills that could be key to them building a successful future for themselves.
If you are interested in further exploring these kinds of social entrepreneurship projects, or in getting your younger relatives involved in robotics, then take a look at the O2 ThinkBig page, which outlines the UK version and that provides a detailed explanation of its workings. Anybody interested in supporting a project in Spain (and who speaks Spanish) can find more information on the ThinkBit website. The kit costs around $60 if you buy all the components on places such as Deal Extreme or similar sites, the instructions are wonderfully detailed, and could be inspired by Marx’s (Groucho) theory that, “Why, even a four-year-old could do this… run out and bring me a four-year-old!” :-)
(En español, aquí)
