Fairy houses: A creative engineering experience

Abstract

A common misconception is that neither Engineers nor their projects are creative. We report on a laboratory program for creating educational displays like those in Museums. The program enables students to (1) design and build an edutainment product, (2) gather data to test their product, and (3) interpret their data. The objective of the project is to create an educational experience for users that shows the potential for creativity within the field of Computer Science. The undergraduate participants created an interactive display that teaches two Computer Science concepts. They created an interactive experience for via a Bluetooth connection to an Arduino powered “Fairy House.” Users unravel a story that involves solving riddles via interpreting Morse code. The display has two learning goals. First, players gain an understanding of how to turn code into text. The second is players discover how binary trees speed search tasks. We also had two design goals, any number of people can play, and players can join or leave without interrupting others. Through in-house testing and trial runs, the students determined that this method of interactive learning is useful for teaching new concepts.