An astonishing array of new technologies is currently effecting a revolution in the professional design of textile artifacts. This integration of electronics and computation into textiles likewise suggests new directions in the practice of children's crafts. In this paper, we present a classification scheme that we believe will prove useful in structuring exploration and discussion of new directions in children's textile-based crafts. Within the context of this classification scheme, we describe several projects in our lab (along with early pilot-testing efforts) that offer examples of how children can work with computationally enriched textiles. We conclude by describing several extremely exciting-but nonetheless plausible-scenarios for continued work in this area.

Abstract

This paper proposes a curriculum for a high school e-textile course-a curriculum rooted in our experiences in developing an etextile construction kit and in holding several courses and workshops with these materials. The paper briefly describes the e-textile kit and reports on our teaching experiences, reflecting on the relationship between the evolving tools and curriculum and our user experiences.

The subject of children's programming has long been a vexed and controversial one in the field of educational technology. Debates in this area have typically focused on issues such as how to create a child-friendly programming language; or whether children can learn particular topics (e.g., recursion) in programming; or indeed, whether it is worthwhile for children to encounter programming at all. For the most part, these debates have taken place against an implicit background of assumptions about what children's programming looks like-namely, an activity focused on creating effects on a desktop screen or, occasionally, robotic toy. This paper argues that the cultural and anthropological contexts of children's programming are now poised to change: that new programming materials, physical settings, and unorthodox display surfaces are likely to shift the nature of the children'sprogramming debate in profound ways, and to make programming a far more informal, approachable, and natural activity than heretofore. We illustrate this argument with projects underway in our own research.

This paper presents a working prototype of a mobile, programmable set of construction kit elements for children. SmartTiles are small, lightweight, independently programmable tile objects that can be combined to cover various sorts of planar surfaces; each touch-sensitive tile contains its own computer and LED, and communicates with its neighboring tiles when placed on an appropriate background material. Collectively, the tiles enact usercustomizable cellular automaton programs and thus display complex and fascinating dynamical patterns of light. In this paper, we discuss the implementation of SmartTiles and explore their potential use as an instance of mobile computation for children. We also discuss the way in which the tiles can be programmed wirelessly via a PDA interface, and discuss the implications of this sort of programming for educational computing more generally.