Make It Interactive

Make It Interactive is a twelve-week run of physical computing, where code escapes the screen and lives in objects students can wear, touch, and install. The course opens with unplugged, whole-body models of how hardware and software actually communicate, then puts a pocket-sized microcontroller in every student's hands to program scrolling messages, animations, and games that respond to buttons, shakes, light, and temperature.

Students then become circuit builders as well as coders. Using conductive thread, paint, and copper tape, they route current to the board's pins and fabricate their own switches and sensors from everyday materials, co-designing hardware and software into responsive systems like intruder alarms that detect, decide, and react with sound, light, radio messages, and servo motion.

The final unit is a maker residency: an e-textiles studio for wearable technology, an interactive art and automation studio, and a capstone in which teams scope a problem from their own lives, define requirements, and engineer a working interactive invention they demo publicly.