Finally, on to the good things that happened at Ars Electronica: the Electrolobby. David Cuartielles set up the stage by turning the Electrolobby into a festival of workshops. There were three traditional workshops, OpenFrameWorks, Arduino, and PyS60, with registration, regular hours, and a whole group of people listening to lectures. Then there were a bunch of drop-in workshops where people of all skill levels showed up and tried their hand at things: Experimental Music Instruments, Pure Data, Asuro robots, Origatronica. My bit was teaching the Pure Data end of things with Koray Tahiroglu.

In these ‘minishops’, people could drop in and start from scratch, bring in ideas from the other workshops and minishops, or work on projects they are already had going. On one hand, it made structured learning and teaching quite difficult since people would drop in at any point of the day and stay for varying lengths of time from hours to days. Even their skill levels varied widely. But this was an experiment, so we were game for seeing what we could make work. I have always been a devotee of following inspiration. It gives us the drive to pursue goals that we would otherwise find difficult. The minishops were scheduled around inspiration. One thing is for sure, we have a lot to learn on how to manage such a situation, but I do believe that many did take away a useful and lasting chunk of knowledge.

The lecture is rarely a good place for learning technical skills, whether in a classroom, a workshop, or wherever. The vast majority of students learn such skills best using hands-on practice. The classroom can be a good environment for lectures and discussions. Therefore it makes to keep the theory in the classroom, and break out learning the skills into separate, hands-on workshops. An essential part of learning programming and electronics, among other things, is feedback. The student hears a bit of new knowledge, attempts to utilize it, then sees what works and what didn’t. This is what makes hands-on learning work.

So what worked in this setting of inspiration-based learning? Students with projects got further along on their projects, some got their projects working by the end. Having a real problem to solve is very important to making hands-on learning work. If students were willing to try things and work by themselves for some part of the time, they could learn relatively quickly. When they hit the hardest problems, the teachers were able to step in and assist. Students who were looking for step-by-step did not fair well.

All in all, I was surprised how many people stayed and worked, and for long periods of time. This was during an art festival, they could have been out and about, enjoying a wide range of interesting art, music, performance, etc. But they choose to spend hours in the dark corner of the Brucknerhaus lobby. That’s got to say something