A place for a guild of @ShrimpingIt facilitators to agree best practice on kit preparation and workshop design to teach learners how to prototype devices.
We coined the word 'shrimping' to describe our improvised hacking practice. The focus; helping learners get started on physical computing by documenting projects which are accessible for them.
These days it is trivial to create objects which have minds of their own! You can source the bits for pennies and the magical knowledge isn't guarded by a secret cabal, but instead is sprawled all over the internet. So why isn't everyone doing it, all the time? Our answer; because it isn't accessible to most people.
So what does accessible really mean? We've broken this down into at least three dimensions
- comprehension
- availability
- cost
Many people think that @ShrimpingIt is all about creating Arduino projects for education which are cheap. However, cost is probably the least important dimension. This may surprise people, but we've often rejected opportunities to save money on kits, to benefit the other two critical principles.
An Arduino 'Why No PCBs' blog post.
##Cost
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus for how views on use of stripboard, choice of jumper wires vs solid core, battleships coordinates and other controversies might be settled.