Teagueduino is an open-source hardware platform that makes building interactive projects—from experiments and games to classroom experiments and prototypes—a whole lot easier. Writing code and wiring up circuits are becoming necessary tools for communities around the world, but the technical challenges of learning to use such tools still remain. Teagueduino bridges the gap between everyday craft supplies and Arduino (an open-source microcontroller), offering real-time feedback, always-valid code creation and a solder-free experience.

Tools and platforms for electronics that enable exploration and learning are often incredibly complex. Even tools designed to simplify the learning curve, such as Arduino, are often only accessible to a quasi-technical crowd already familiar with electronics and/or writing code. Teagueduino makes electronics and programming easier for a much broader audience. In addition to creating a clean user interface, simple plug-and-play connectors and a community website for sharing and exploration, Teagueduino was built to grow with the user.

Each aspect of the programming software was carefully considered to provide a simple, informative interface that helps users learn to program without have prior technical code-writing skills. Using a combination of iconic graphics, real-time feedback, sparkline data graphs, and drop-down menu programming, Teagueduino users are empowered to jump right in and start making interactive projects, while learning the basics of code as they explore. Plugging a sensor to one of the input ports, hooking up an output device and using the very simple Teagueduino user interface can make anything from a harmonic music generator to a robotic frog. Since everything changes in real time, there’s no having to wait for things to compile or the device to reset.

Learning about electronics and programming is intuitive. On teagueduino.org, step-by-step tutorials are available for wiring up custom sensors and outputs. For software writers, Arduino project templates help users migrate to working directly in C programming language. And for the truly advanced, the main control board (Teensy++) can be popped off the Teagueduino board for full-out embedded development.

Teaching with Teagueduino is engaging and exploratory. Because everything is built from the ground up, it is very easy to get started, and users will find many ideas and projects to explore. Teachers can browse projects in related fields to get ideas about where to start and how to build interactive models and experiments in real-time with students. As users’ skills and needs grow, Teagueduino’s capabilities grow with them.

Teagueduino started as an experiment to look at ways to make embedded development and programming easy and more accessible to the education and design fields. A quick prototype was built that consisted of a simple real-time platform allowing for code to be modified while a program is running, enabling designers to immediately view feedback as their projects take shape. After three rounds of internal prototyping, workshops and testing, Teagueduino was launched on Kickstarter and raised over $75,000 in funding for the first 328 limited-edition kits.

Credits: TEAGUE, Adam Kumpf, Matt Wolfe and TEAGUE Interaction Design Team
Contact: Keisha Kelly: [email protected]