On Wednesday, April 18th, JHU ECE PhD candidates, Kate Fischl and Ben Skerritt-Davis, accompanied a group of students from Baltimore’s Western High school to Baltimore’s Light City festival, all wearing Arduino-based light up necklaces. The students are participants in Kate and Ben’s after school workshop on wearable electronics.
In the fall the students learned basic electronics concepts, as well as how to solder, code, and debug, enabling each student to build her own LED light-up necklace. This spring the workshop has focused on adding additional sensors like microphones and accelerometers, enabling the necklaces to light up in response to sound or motion. After building these necklaces, it was fun to walk around Light City and discuss the possible coding and structure behind many of the Light City installations.
As the students walked around, they were often stopped as people wanted to know where they had purchased their necklaces. Unfortunately for these strangers, the students explained how they had built each necklace themselves.