The E-Textiles Bracelet Hack: Bringing Making to Middle School Classrooms

In this paper, we present an electronic textiles project called the "bracelet hack" that is intended to facilitate the introduction of making activities into classrooms. The project's design significantly decreases the costs and amount of classroom time that must be spent on the construction aspects of the project while still engaging students in design challenges. To test our hypothesis that the bracelet hack would allow just as much introduction to coding as more complicated, sewn LilyPad Arduino projects, we introduced the bracelet hack in the context of a professional development workshop for middle school science teachers. We analyzed teachers' audio recorded interactions while completing the bracelet hack and found that teachers were able to learn computational concepts, practices, and perspectives through the activity.