Picademy Wales

pi day one

Last week I took part in the first Picademy Wales, thanks to Raspberry Pi, who are funding our new project Somatopia.

It was in at the deep end for me as I haven’t touched any real programming since my experiments with Lingo! The Pi team were great, we covered so much ground in two days, but the best thing was getting to grips with the Pi Camera. Thanks to Carrie Ann for the book “Adventures in Raspberry Pi“. This book is great for getting started.

More on Somatopia in the next few months but the aim is use the inherent accessibility of RaspberryPi to teach people how to co-create interactive artworks.

We will start by migrating some of the most popular aspects of ReacTickles, Somantics, Somability and Somatopia over the RaspberryPi, and then experiment with developing some simple coding modules to allow others to generate their own experimental artworks.

Most importantly we will create resources that help people to visualise their ideas. The methods we will demonstrate are based on human centred, participatory design, encouraging novice developers to imagine and test without having to go any where near a line of code. To quote Pete, “Technology is not an idea”.

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