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LilyTiny in the Wild: Studying the Adoption of a Low-Cost Sewable Microcontroller for Computing Education

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James DavisAuthors Info & Claims

DIS '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference

Pages 282 - 293

https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3595994

Published: 10 July 2023 Publication History

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Abstract

We designed the LilyTiny sewable microcontroller over ten years ago in an effort to make electronic textiles more accessible to students, educators, and novices; it was meant to be affordable, easy to get started with, and well-supported by curriculum. We also designed the LilyTiny with hopes of helping to bridge the gap between e-textile activities using only lights and batteries – and those requiring knowledge of Arduino programming. Following its pilot, the LilyTiny was released as a commercial product through SparkFun Electronics, costing about $5 (USD) and shipping pre-programmed to control various LED behaviors. Free curriculum was released alongside it, detailing six low-cost activities that could be taught without any prior electronics experience.

This paper shares our study of the LilyTiny’s adoption since its release, especially with regard to computing education. We discuss several measures of impact, beginning with a review of derivative products and a multi-year analysis of sales data from the LilyTiny’s sole distributor. We then augment our discussion with a survey of customer reviews, social media posts, and related computing education curriculum and research. Finally, we reflect on the experience of bringing a prototype to market – and how this work might invite broader discussion around defining and measuring impact. Ultimately, we do believe that our findings substantiate the LilyTiny’s value in the computing education landscape – particularly when it comes to lowering barriers of entry to e-textiles.

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Cited By

Emerson AEndow STorres C(2024)Shared, Shaped, and Stolen: Tracing Sites of Knowledge Transfer across Creative Communities of PracticeProceedings of the 16th Conference on Creativity & Cognition10.1145/3635636.3656199(638-650)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3635636.3656199

Index Terms

LilyTiny in the Wild: Studying the Adoption of a Low-Cost Sewable Microcontroller for Computing Education
1. Hardware
  1. Printed circuit boards
    1. PCB design and layout
2. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Informal education
      2. K-12 education

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

DIS '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference

July 2023

2717 pages

ISBN:9781450398930

DOI:10.1145/3563657

Editors:
Daragh Byrne
Carnegie Mellon University
,
Nikolas Martelaro
Carnegie Mellon University
,
Andy Boucher
Northumbria University
,
David Chatting
Goldsmiths, University of London
,
Sarah Fdili Alaoui
LISN-Université Paris Saclay
,
Sarah Fox
Carnegie Mellon University
,
Iohanna Nicenboim
Delft University of Technology
,
Cayley MacArthur
University of Waterloo

Copyright © 2023 Owner/Author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 10 July 2023

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DIS '23: Designing Interactive Systems Conference

July 10 - 14, 2023

PA, Pittsburgh, USA

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Cited By

Emerson AEndow STorres C(2024)Shared, Shaped, and Stolen: Tracing Sites of Knowledge Transfer across Creative Communities of PracticeProceedings of the 16th Conference on Creativity & Cognition10.1145/3635636.3656199(638-650)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3635636.3656199

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