A new medium to engage students: Electronic pop-up books

I love Leah Buechley’s imagination for the roles that computing can play, especially from a child’s perspective.  We are trying to incorporate her wearable, textile computing into our Georgia Computes! Girl Scout workshops.  Her new project, electronic pop-up books, looks wonderful.  (Do click on the below link and see the gorgeous picture.)  I loved looking at my kids’ pop-up books and the inventive things created there.  Computational pop-up books sound like a wonderful medium to engage new computationalists.

Venus fly traps spring up invitingly from one page; sensors in the trap’s jaws respond to the user’s touch, gently closing around the probing finger as it withdraws. The sensors control the amount of electric current flowing through springs in the leaf. The springs are made of the shape memory alloy nickel-titanium and contract to close the leaf shut as their coils are heated by the current. The leaves reopen as the wire cools.

via Embedded electronics bring pop-up books to life – tech – 21 January 2010 – New Scientist.

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